Re: [EM] Why I think IRV isn't a serious alternative
Greg, you didn't actually say that IRV is good, you just said that it's unlikely to be bad. Huh? One reason I think it's good in part because it's very likely to elect elect the Condorcet candidate, if that's what you mean by unlikely to be bad. Some other reasons I think it's good is that it resists strategic voting, allows third parties to participate, and paves the way for PR. Why bother with something that's unlikely to be bad when we can just as easily get something without that badness? You can't get rid of badness. Every system is imperfect. IRV is non-monotonic; Condorcet is susceptible to burial. So we're left to balance the relative pros and cons. Oh, and actually it _is_ likely to be bad. See that first graph? See how over thousands of simulated elections it gets lower social satisfaction? Brian, you're graphs are computer-generated elections that you made up. They aren't actual elections that took place in practice, which show a high unlikelihood of being bad. When your theory is a poor predictor of the data, it's time to change the theory, not insist the data must be different from what they are. Greg On Nov 25, 2008, at 11:52 AM, Greg wrote: I will believe that when I'm presented with a non-negligible number of actual IRV elections for public office that failed to elect the right winner. And for starters, you get to define what right is. Preferably something of the form: in Election X, IRV elected candidate Y but candidate Z was the right winner, because of [insert your criteria and evidence here]. The more such cases you have, the more convincing your argument. I've studied every IRV election for public office ever held in the United States, most of which have their full ranking data publicly available, and every single time IRV elected the Condorcet winner, something I consider to be a good, though not perfect, rule of thumb for determining the right winner. When you present a case in which IRV did not elect the right winner, maybe I'll agree or maybe I'll dispute your criteria, but at least then we'd be off the blackboard and into the world of real elections. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Why the concept of sincere votes in Range is flawed.
Jonathan Lundell writes: On Nov 25, 2008, at 8:45 PM, Kevin Venzke wrote: --- En date de : Mar 25.11.08, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax [EMAIL PROTECTED] a écrit : What Approval sincerely represents from a voter is a *decision* as to where to place an Approval cutoff. But is it not true that what *all* methods sincerely represent from a voter are the decisions related to voting under that method? If a decision makes sense in a given context, then that is a sincere decision. Is that not your stance? It shouldn't be. Sincere is a term of art in this context, not a value judgement. An insincere vote is simply one that does not represent the preference of the voter if the voter were a dictator. There's nothing *wrong* with voting insincerely (or, equivalently, strategically), in this sense; a voter has a right to do their best to achieve an optimum result in a particular context. Sincere is fine as a term of art. The limitation with sincerity under that definition is that it only applies to the top N choices in an N-winner election. Most strategies involve manipulation of lower rankings. Abd's post made the error of conflating insincere voting with strategic voting, and the further error of claiming that neither approval nor range systems are ever vulnerable to strategic voting -- rather than restricting the hypothesis to sincere votes. Michael Poole Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Why I think IRV isn't a serious alternative
On Nov 26, 2008, at 5:53 AM, Greg wrote: Greg, you didn't actually say that IRV is good, you just said that it's unlikely to be bad. Huh? One reason I think it's good in part because it's very likely to elect elect the Condorcet candidate, if that's what you mean by unlikely to be bad. Some other reasons I think it's good is that it resists strategic voting, allows third parties to participate, and paves the way for PR. And you get all those other good qualities in just about every other election method past 'pick one'. And I should have flipped that around, 'unlikely to be bad' means that there's a definite chance that it will be bad. Why bother with something that's unlikely to be bad when we can just as easily get something without that badness? You can't get rid of badness. Every system is imperfect. IRV is non-monotonic; Condorcet is susceptible to burial. So we're left to balance the relative pros and cons. So, you discount and ignore the possibility that IRV will make systemically the wrong choice and behave chaotically, and I discount and neglect the possibility that some people will cast crazy rankings ballots. Obviously I still think I'm making the more rational evaluation. Oh, and actually it _is_ likely to be bad. See that first graph? See how over thousands of simulated elections it gets lower social satisfaction? Brian, you're graphs are computer-generated elections that you made up. They aren't actual elections that took place in practice, which show a high unlikelihood of being bad. When your theory is a poor predictor of the data, it's time to change the theory, not insist the data must be different from what they are. Given the substantial lack of data (pretty little real world rankings ballot data available), I think the simulations are still valid and interesting. The simulations explore a specific and small portion of the problem space in detail. I'm looking at races of N choices which are similarly valued by all the voters. It's a tight race. Actual elections haven't been that tight. But tight races are the interesting ones. When it's crunch time, those are the ones that matter. Almost any method can correctly determine the winner of a race that isn't tight. So, IRV has demonstrated in the real world that it can solve easy problems. So what? Why wait until it gets the wrong answer in a real election to admit that IRV can get the wrong answer? In matters of public safety that would be called a 'tombstone mentality'. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Why I think IRV isn't a serious alternative
At 04:29 PM 11/25/2008, Jonathan Lundell wrote: On Nov 25, 2008, at 1:19 PM, Markus Schulze wrote: Or are only IRV supporters allowed to use polling data to show the greatness of IRV, while advocates of other methods have to use complete ballot data? I think we must be careful about using polling data when we're comparing election methods in which voters have different strategic motivations, and that taking sufficient care may preclude drawing firm conclusions. Absolutely; however, the difference in strategic motivation between three-rank IRV (as is used in the U.S.) and top-two runoff is practically nil. The vast majority of voters simply vote sincerely, I'm sure, in both methods. They will vote in the first round of top-two runoff for their favorite, almost certainly. Strategic voting (such as turkey-raising) can backfire, you know. Make a mistake, you might end up with a turkey. Top two runoff allows the voter to postpone the decision of who to rank second. I just saw the video from the San Francisco Department of Elections, 2006, that said it elects winners with a majority. No qualifier. Not majority after excluding exhausted ballots. A lot of people, including officials and others who should know better, *including opponents of IRV*, were hornswoggled. If IRV were to actually be a majority method, as claimed, i.e., if it continued to require a true majority, it would be a much better method. I.e., top-two runoff IRV. Instead, San Francisco gets Plurality results for a far higher cost than Plurality. Basically, SF could have gotten the same result by eliminating the majority requirement. There is not one election that that has turned out differenty. Would Plurality voters have voted the same as in IRV. Most of them would have, I'm pretty sure. The difference would be fewer votes for minor candidates, and the rations between the frontrunners would generally have remained the same. Voting systems analysts have generally thought of factional elections, where supporters of a minor candidate will, almost entirely, vote for only one of the two frontrunners, where vote-splitting only affects one side. In elections with a lot of candidates, there are likely to be vote-splits that cuts both ways. The Nader effect in Florida, for example, would have been countered to some degree by the effect from Libertarian and other candidates. We really don't know what would have happened had Florida been IRV or another method allowing more than one vote. Personally, I don't think that any available single-winner method, IRV not excepted, is particularly great, though I prefer ranked-ordinal methods to FPTP or TTR. It's almost certainly true that TTR has generally better results than IRV. Essentially, when needed, two ballots are better than one. Three would be better than two! Democratic process skips all this crap and iterates binary decisions, with a majority requirement to make any decision. It continues to iterate until a majority is found, or a majority decides to adjourn None of the Above is always on the ballot with true democratic elections, and doesn't have to be a named candidate. With Approval, for example, just write it in! Lizard People would have been fine. My mild preference for IRV over Condorcet methods (and stronger preference over approval and range) has to do with wanting to keep strategic voter considerations to a minimum. That ends up being a somewhat subjective and intuitive conclusion; at least that's how I see it. Yeah. Unfortunately, intuition sucks when its been misled by centuries of diffuse propaganda and simple habitual assumptions, plus a boatload of very targeted spin-doctrine actively promoted recently. You want to minimize strategic voting, why not use methods designed to do exactly that, to the point where it is debatable whether what remains is strategic voting or harmful at all? Why *prohibit* voters from equal ranking? Why do you imagine that you get better results by confining the voters without clear cause? IRV with equal ranking allowed: much better! It would allow voters to vote Approval style or Ranked style, whichever they prefer. Power to the Voters! Count All the Votes! Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] language/framing quibble
Fred Gohlke wrote: Good Morning, Kristofer re: You may say that parties, wanting to be re-elected, would stay in center ... I think parties are more inclined to keep one foot in the center while stretching as far as they can toward the extreme with the other. That's why we so often hear that the 'neoconservatives' have taken control of this party or the 'ultraliberals' have taken control of that party. The stretch toward extremism to attract the more radical constituencies is the dynamic that causes the lurching we experience. That's an interesting point, one that I hadn't considered even though what I said about primaries could probably be used to derive what you said. Consider the situation on a left-right spectrum: -1 0 +1 C Now, the parties (call them X and Y) would want to position themselves in this manner, to capture the most voters: -1 0 +1 ---XCY--- However, this also means that each party reaches over the entire half of the spectrum. Keeping that platform coherent, no matter keeping the party united, is not going to be easy. Because of the center of wings or primary effect, the party considers its center to be somewhere around 0.5 or -0.5. So what would one expect to happen in this case? Well, the parties would try to position themselves close to the middle in order to capture as many voters as possible. When the feedback from the voters is strong, the party will remain there. But the party's own center is at the 0.5 points, therefore, when there is little feedback, the party stance will creep towards the 0.5 point. It can't just go there immediately, because then the other party could follow and claim all the voters that would be lost, so there's some tension between the goals. If one election every four years is weak feedback, then we shouldn't be surprised to see the parties move towards 0.5 (or -0.5, depending on what party we're talking about). If they can convince the voters they're close to 0 while they're really at 0.5, that would be even better. It's also possible for voters or parties to be imperfect. A voter just to the right of center may vote for X for various reasons (not knowing the platform well enough or whatnot), and a party may not have its internal center at 0.5 (depends on who is really active within the party). These are long term analyses, and dynamics can weaken them. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Why I think IRV isn't a serious alternative
On Nov 26, 2008, at 8:30 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: Personally, I don't think that any available single-winner method, IRV not excepted, is particularly great, though I prefer ranked-ordinal methods to FPTP or TTR. It's almost certainly true that TTR has generally better results than IRV. Essentially, when needed, two ballots are better than one. Three would be better than two! Democratic process skips all this crap and iterates binary decisions, with a majority requirement to make any decision. It continues to iterate until a majority is found, or a majority decides to adjourn None of the Above is always on the ballot with true democratic elections, and doesn't have to be a named candidate. With Approval, for example, just write it in! Lizard People would have been fine. This (TTR vs IRV) is a matter that we can simply disagree on. I'd set three-rank IRV aside as an unfortunate but hopefully temporary response to voting equipment limitations. My problem with TTR is that it's almost as bad at encouraging strategic voting as FPTP is. Better, yes, but not good. Approval is also a strategy game that I'd rather not play; sure, I can imagine elections in which Approval is easy and relatively non-strategic, but it's also easy to imagine otherwise. I confess that I'm partial to the iterative process, at least under the right circumstances. US political parties have used it in the past, and it's suitable to an open-ended convention setting. The US Greens used a kind of live IRV in their 2004 convention, with multiple vote-for-one rounds with elimination and/or withdrawal between rounds. But there are lots of reasons that we don't want an open-ended process for public elections, or even a process (like GPUS-2004) that guarantees eventual termination, but with an uncertain number of rounds. I prefer the IRV compromise to TTR or Approval. BTW, most of the list will probably be aware that the second round of the Georgia (US) TTR senatorial election will be held next Tuesday. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_election_in_Georgia,_2008 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Why the concept of sincere votes in Range is flawed.
It seems that voting method Approval has cut its ties to English term approval (at least at the EM list). In ranking based methods EM people seem to assume that voters have some easy to identify transitive order of the candidates in their mind (=sincere opinion). I find it revealing that there is not much discussion on the possibility to cast non-transitive votes. Such votes would be strategically more efficient than the transitive ones. Use of transitive votes seem to reflect the idea that the sincere opinion of a rational voter would always be transitive. (Well, of course casting non-transitive votes would be technically more challenging.) I want to add to this by saying that if Approval is about approval, well, then discussions about frontrunner plus strategies won't capture the intent or point of the method. If the statement for Approval voting is vote for those you like, or vote for those of which you approve, then one should expect voters to do that, absent strategic incentive. Say there's a certain group of people that a voter approves of. If he has to plan beyond that point, then that's strategy. On the other hand, if Approval really is pick those candidates you like more than or equal to the frontrunner you like the most, then there's not much approval-ish about the method, in the ordinary sense. It asks the voter to optimally configure his ballot. If we're going to do that, we should leave the task to a computer and use DSV instead. Perhaps you agree with most of this, but I couldn't find anywhere else to put it. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Why I think IRV isn't a serious alternative
Kevin Venzke wrote: Hi Kristofer, --- En date de : Mar 25.11.08, Kristofer Munsterhjelm [EMAIL PROTECTED] a écrit : If IRV does elect the true Condorcet winner in all realistic elections (as opposed to the CW according to strategic ballots), and the Australian two-party (two and a third?) dominance arises from IRV, then that means that any Condorcet single-round single winner method will lead to two party dominance. That would be unfortunate. Of course, if it is the truth, no matter how unfortunate it is, it'll still be the truth; and in that case we should focus on multiwinner elections and PR instead. Might depend on what your goals are. If you want multiple parties in order to represent more interests, best go to PR in the first place. I want it to be possible to have multiple viable parties in order to make it more likely that the median voter can get what he actually wants. For the latter, I don't think it's clear that if Condorcet can't succeed, nothing can. I suppose what I want is a combination of this. The voter should have what he wants (which is to say, the method should make it more likely that the median voter can get what he wants), but if there is no selection among alternatives, that can't happen. In other words, if there is a two-party state and the parties don't care about your issues, you're out of luck; and if they say they care about your issues, only to turn around once elected, you have little chance to do anything. A duopoly is bad whether it's a political or economic duopoly. So I want the people to be able to get what they want, but also the method to support the circumstances that ensure that will be true in the future as well. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] Unmanipulable Majority strategy criterion
I have a suggestion for a new strategy criterion I might call Unmanipulable Majority. *If (assuming there are more than two candidates) the ballot rules don't constrain voters to expressing fewer than three preference-levels, and A wins being voted above B on more than half the ballots, then it must not be possible to make B the winner by altering any of the ballots on which B is voted above A.* Does anyone else think that this is highly desirable? Is it new? Chris Benham Start your day with Yahoo!7 and win a Sony Bravia TV. Enter now http://au.docs.yahoo.com/homepageset/?p1=otherp2=aup3=tagline Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Why the concept of sincere votes in Range is flawed.
--- On Wed, 26/11/08, Jonathan Lundell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: There's nothing *wrong* with voting insincerely (or, equivalently, strategically), in this sense; a voter has a right to do their best to achieve an optimum result in a particular context. I think it would be better not to classify voting insincerely and voting strategically as equivalent. For example in Approval some voter may estimate the popularity of all the candidates and the expected behaviour of other voters and his own preferences and interests, and then decides to fill the ballot in a certain way in order to maximize the probability of reaching good results in the election. In this case it may be best to say that the voter identified the best tactic to vote and therefore voted strategically. But doing so was not insincere since that was what all the voters were expected to do. Some methods thus make the assumption that voters will find their best strategy and then apply it while other methods may assume that voters will simply mark their sincere preferences on the ballot (i.e. without considering how the votes are counted and how they could influence the outcome by casting some specific kind of vote). (There is a difference between ballots that include falsified opinions an ballots where the voter has just chosen one of the available different alternatives that are all equally sincere. In Approval one could say that any position of the approval cutoff is equally sincere as long as it separates a set of better candidates from a set of worse candidates (or alternatively one could require the cutoff to be in such place where there is a large gap between the utilities of the approved and non-approved candidates). In rated and ranked methods the sincere vote may be unique, and any deviation from that may be considered a falsified vote / insincere voting.) I think it depends on the society and its rules (and the method and election in question) if insincere voting is considered to be wrong or not. In many cases the society will benefit if insincere voting is generally not accepted. (Strategic voting can be accepted in elections where strategic voting is the agreed way to vote.) Juho P.S. Casting a ballot that deviates from the sincere _opinion_ may be a different thing (=still sincere although strategic) than insincere _voting_ Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Why the concept of sincere votes in Range is flawed.
- Yes, I agree with most of this - Voters should be made aware of the different approaches so that they can use the intended one (or the one that suits them better) - Computerized methods could add something (e.g. more sincere input data, possibility of loops in the strategy changes) to the approach where voters just guess what their best vote might be Juho --- On Wed, 26/11/08, Kristofer Munsterhjelm [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: Kristofer Munsterhjelm [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [EM] Why the concept of sincere votes in Range is flawed. To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wednesday, 26 November, 2008, 7:40 PM It seems that voting method Approval has cut its ties to English term approval (at least at the EM list). In ranking based methods EM people seem to assume that voters have some easy to identify transitive order of the candidates in their mind (=sincere opinion). I find it revealing that there is not much discussion on the possibility to cast non-transitive votes. Such votes would be strategically more efficient than the transitive ones. Use of transitive votes seem to reflect the idea that the sincere opinion of a rational voter would always be transitive. (Well, of course casting non-transitive votes would be technically more challenging.) I want to add to this by saying that if Approval is about approval, well, then discussions about frontrunner plus strategies won't capture the intent or point of the method. If the statement for Approval voting is vote for those you like, or vote for those of which you approve, then one should expect voters to do that, absent strategic incentive. Say there's a certain group of people that a voter approves of. If he has to plan beyond that point, then that's strategy. On the other hand, if Approval really is pick those candidates you like more than or equal to the frontrunner you like the most, then there's not much approval-ish about the method, in the ordinary sense. It asks the voter to optimally configure his ballot. If we're going to do that, we should leave the task to a computer and use DSV instead. Perhaps you agree with most of this, but I couldn't find anywhere else to put it. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Why I think IRV isn't a serious alternative
--- On Wed, 26/11/08, Kristofer Munsterhjelm [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: Kristofer Munsterhjelm [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [EM] Why I think IRV isn't a serious alternative To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wednesday, 26 November, 2008, 7:53 PM Kevin Venzke wrote: Hi Kristofer, --- En date de : Mar 25.11.08, Kristofer Munsterhjelm [EMAIL PROTECTED] a écrit : If IRV does elect the true Condorcet winner in all realistic elections (as opposed to the CW according to strategic ballots), and the Australian two-party (two and a third?) dominance arises from IRV, then that means that any Condorcet single-round single winner method will lead to two party dominance. That would be unfortunate. Of course, if it is the truth, no matter how unfortunate it is, it'll still be the truth; and in that case we should focus on multiwinner elections and PR instead. Might depend on what your goals are. If you want multiple parties in order to represent more interests, best go to PR in the first place. I want it to be possible to have multiple viable parties in order to make it more likely that the median voter can get what he actually wants. For the latter, I don't think it's clear that if Condorcet can't succeed, nothing can. I suppose what I want is a combination of this. The voter should have what he wants (which is to say, the method should make it more likely that the median voter can get what he wants), but if there is no selection among alternatives, that can't happen. In other words, if there is a two-party state and the parties don't care about your issues, you're out of luck; and if they say they care about your issues, only to turn around once elected, you have little chance to do anything. A duopoly is bad whether it's a political or economic duopoly. So I want the people to be able to get what they want, but also the method to support the circumstances that ensure that will be true in the future as well. I think this is one key to how also current multi-party systems could be improved. Many people hate the party structure since often the parties seem to be quite stagnated and deaf to the voices of reason. If this happens in a situation where the country is in a stable state without any risk of too rapid movements in the political structure, then it may make sense to encourage the political parties/structure to react better to the needs / development interests of the citizens. Example 1. STV is a method that allows voters to influence very freely on which candidates will be elected when compared to more party oriented methods. There may be some drawbacks in complexity (especially if there are many candidates) and lack of structure (candidates are not bound to programs). Example 2. Subgroups withing the parties allow voters to influence more on which candidates will be elected when compared to basic party oriented methods. Expressiveness is more limited than in example 1. Groupings are more clear than in example 1. In both approaches the main expected benefit thus is that these methods are supposed to make it possible to the voters to have a say on what direction the political parties will grow (example 2 focuses more on this), or allow elected representatives to form freely any kind of coalitions (=not necessarily bound to the official and limiting party policy) when making decisions (example 1 is more radical here). Juho 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] Why the concept of sincere votes in Range is flawed.
On Nov 26, 2008, at 1:50 PM, Juho Laatu wrote: --- On Wed, 26/11/08, Jonathan Lundell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: There's nothing *wrong* with voting insincerely (or, equivalently, strategically), in this sense; a voter has a right to do their best to achieve an optimum result in a particular context. I think it would be better not to classify voting insincerely and voting strategically as equivalent. For example in Approval some voter may estimate the popularity of all the candidates and the expected behaviour of other voters and his own preferences and interests, and then decides to fill the ballot in a certain way in order to maximize the probability of reaching good results in the election. In this case it may be best to say that the voter identified the best tactic to vote and therefore voted strategically. But doing so was not insincere since that was what all the voters were expected to do. I agree; it's a useful distinction. Some methods thus make the assumption that voters will find their best strategy and then apply it while other methods may assume that voters will simply mark their sincere preferences on the ballot (i.e. without considering how the votes are counted and how they could influence the outcome by casting some specific kind of vote). (There is a difference between ballots that include falsified opinions an ballots where the voter has just chosen one of the available different alternatives that are all equally sincere. In Approval one could say that any position of the approval cutoff is equally sincere as long as it separates a set of better candidates from a set of worse candidates (or alternatively one could require the cutoff to be in such place where there is a large gap between the utilities of the approved and non-approved candidates). In rated and ranked methods the sincere vote may be unique, and any deviation from that may be considered a falsified vote / insincere voting.) I think it depends on the society and its rules (and the method and election in question) if insincere voting is considered to be wrong or not. In many cases the society will benefit if insincere voting is generally not accepted. (Strategic voting can be accepted in elections where strategic voting is the agreed way to vote.) It's a reason that (in)sincere isn't very good terminology for everyday use; likewise manipulation. They're fine terms when well- defined and used in the context of social choice theory, but they carry a lot of baggage. A voter is, in my view, completely justified in ignoring the name of the election method (approval, for instance) and the instructions (vote in order of preference) and casting their vote strictly on the basis of how the ballot will be counted. (Which is why I'm partial to ordinal systems; it seems to me that I as a voter can pretty easily order candidates without considering strategy, whereas the decision of where to draw the line for Approval, or how to assign cardinal values to candidates, explicitly brings strategy into the picture.) Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Why I think IRV isn't a serious alternative
A good summary. If we only cared about the easy ones Plurality would be good enough. DWK On Wed, 26 Nov 2008 08:43:42 -0500 Brian Olson wrote: On Nov 26, 2008, at 5:53 AM, Greg wrote: Oh, and actually it _is_ likely to be bad. See that first graph? See how over thousands of simulated elections it gets lower social satisfaction? Brian, you're graphs are computer-generated elections that you made up. They aren't actual elections that took place in practice, which show a high unlikelihood of being bad. When your theory is a poor predictor of the data, it's time to change the theory, not insist the data must be different from what they are. Given the substantial lack of data (pretty little real world rankings ballot data available), I think the simulations are still valid and interesting. The simulations explore a specific and small portion of the problem space in detail. I'm looking at races of N choices which are similarly valued by all the voters. It's a tight race. Actual elections haven't been that tight. But tight races are the interesting ones. When it's crunch time, those are the ones that matter. Almost any method can correctly determine the winner of a race that isn't tight. So, IRV has demonstrated in the real world that it can solve easy problems. So what? Why wait until it gets the wrong answer in a real election to admit that IRV can get the wrong answer? In matters of public safety that would be called a 'tombstone mentality'. -- [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. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Why I think IRV isn't a serious alternative
To Greg Dennis: I appreciate your efforts to express your arguments clearly and defend them with good data. Nevertheless, I find them mostly unpersuasive. You say in your latest post that IRV resists strategic voting and Condorcet is susceptible to burial. But both of these beliefs have been discussed extensively on this list over the years and as far as I can recall, there has been no consensus about them. As for the latter, there is little evidence that Condorcet's susceptibility to burying is anything but theoretical. If used in actual public elections, it may turn out that burying wouldn't be a problem at all. At worst, burial efforts by supporters of some candidates might be slightly unevenly offset by those of the supporters of other candidates. IRV, on the other hand, presents unquestionably serious strategy problems when a third party candidate gains enough support to strongly challenge two major party candidates and all three have close to the same amount of support (say between 25% to 40% each). In such cases, many people would begin worrying about whether strategic voting would be a good idea but would have trouble figuring out how best to vote strategically, given how erratically IRV functions in such situations. Voting for their second choices could even improve the chances of their favorites, while voting for their favorites could reduce their chances. Strategic voting could seem very desirable yet impossible to know how to do. So maybe IRV does resist strategic voting, but that may not be very comforting. Data from previous elections won't settle the IRV versus Condorcet debate. There have not been enough of them in the U.S. More important, there haven't been any major federal or state elections (presidential, senatorial, or gubernatorial) and very few major local elections (mayoral or other) using IRV. These would be far and away the most important kinds of test cases - i.e., the kinds of elections that would matter the most and where voters would be most familiar with all the candidates and therefore would find it easiest to rank them. I also must reject your contention that IRV is easier to explain. Condorcet, or what I prefer to call IRRV (Instant Round Robin Voting) is every bit as easy to explain as IRV. IRV and IRRV both use the same kinds of ranked ballots. The main difference (setting aside problems involved in permitting or disallowing equal ranking and unranked candidates) is that IRV uses the ranking data to simulate a series of runoff elections whereas IRRV uses the same data to simulate separate 2-person contests between each candidate and every other candidate. There's no need to talk about matrices and other technicalities about data storage and calculation. Using the same kinds of simple examples, it's just as easy to explain how IRRV works as it is to explain IRV. And although the possibility of cycles makes explaining IRRV more complicated, other kinds of problems make explaining IRV similarly more complicated. The concept of a candidate who beats all others in one to one contests may even be much more intuitively compelling to most people than the concept of a candidate who wins a series of runoffs. They might find IRRV especially compelling after it is explained how IRV increases the likelihood that a strong compromise candidate would be eliminated with the result that the winner could be a very divisive candidate who is strongly supported by a substantial minority but strongly opposed (even hated) by another substantial minority. Is that really the kind of outcome most people would prefer, knowing that the compromise candidate would have defeated both of the others in an IRRV election? I realize that many IRV supporters are fond of dismissing compromise candidates as bland and with little core support. But this is little more than rhetoric designed to support their debatable opinions. It's possible for a compromise candidate to be anything but bland. Ross Perot (vis-a-vis Bush Sr and Clinton in 1992) and Ralph Nader (vis-a-vis Bush Jr and Gore in 2000) both may have been very good examples. John Anderson (vis-a-vis Carter and Reagan in 1980) may have been as well. It seems likely to me that Anderson, Perot, and Nader all would have had much better chances in IRRV elections than in IRV elections and that all might have made better presidents than Reagan, Clinton, or Bush Jr. You worry that compromise candidates may tend to be people who speak in generalities and refuse to say where they stand whereas IRV will help insure that we know where the winner will stand. But you cite no examples, which is surprising given how much importance you have attached to basing conclusions about IRV on lessons from past elections. Until you do cite some actual examples of dangerously bland and platitudinous candidates who, in Condorcet elections, would threaten more forthcoming ones, your worries are
Re: [EM] Why I think IRV isn't a serious alternative
That is incorrect. There have been tight (not easy) elections where IRV chose the Condorcet winner. The recent Pierce County Executive and Assessor-Recorder races are two examples. Also, there's actually a decent amount of real world ranking data available. IRV data from San Francisco, Burlington, and Pierce County. STV data from Cambridge and Ireland. Preferential presidential polls from Ireland. And more. I'm in the process of making it all available online in a uniform format. Greg On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 6:22 PM, Dave Ketchum [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A good summary. If we only cared about the easy ones Plurality would be good enough. DWK On Wed, 26 Nov 2008 08:43:42 -0500 Brian Olson wrote: On Nov 26, 2008, at 5:53 AM, Greg wrote: Oh, and actually it _is_ likely to be bad. See that first graph? See how over thousands of simulated elections it gets lower social satisfaction? Brian, you're graphs are computer-generated elections that you made up. They aren't actual elections that took place in practice, which show a high unlikelihood of being bad. When your theory is a poor predictor of the data, it's time to change the theory, not insist the data must be different from what they are. Given the substantial lack of data (pretty little real world rankings ballot data available), I think the simulations are still valid and interesting. The simulations explore a specific and small portion of the problem space in detail. I'm looking at races of N choices which are similarly valued by all the voters. It's a tight race. Actual elections haven't been that tight. But tight races are the interesting ones. When it's crunch time, those are the ones that matter. Almost any method can correctly determine the winner of a race that isn't tight. So, IRV has demonstrated in the real world that it can solve easy problems. So what? Why wait until it gets the wrong answer in a real election to admit that IRV can get the wrong answer? In matters of public safety that would be called a 'tombstone mentality'. -- [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. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Why the concept of sincere votes in Range is flawed.
Yes, one could use also some more neutral terms than (in)sincere and manipulation (or falsify). Terms like personal opinion based or personal utility based would be quite neutral (but longer). If one wants to replace also strategic one could try something like optimized or tactically best. (I'm sure there are better ones too.) Juho --- On Thu, 27/11/08, Jonathan Lundell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: Jonathan Lundell [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [EM] Why the concept of sincere votes in Range is flawed. To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thursday, 27 November, 2008, 1:17 AM On Nov 26, 2008, at 1:50 PM, Juho Laatu wrote: --- On Wed, 26/11/08, Jonathan Lundell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: There's nothing *wrong* with voting insincerely (or, equivalently, strategically), in this sense; a voter has a right to do their best to achieve an optimum result in a particular context. I think it would be better not to classify voting insincerely and voting strategically as equivalent. For example in Approval some voter may estimate the popularity of all the candidates and the expected behaviour of other voters and his own preferences and interests, and then decides to fill the ballot in a certain way in order to maximize the probability of reaching good results in the election. In this case it may be best to say that the voter identified the best tactic to vote and therefore voted strategically. But doing so was not insincere since that was what all the voters were expected to do. I agree; it's a useful distinction. Some methods thus make the assumption that voters will find their best strategy and then apply it while other methods may assume that voters will simply mark their sincere preferences on the ballot (i.e. without considering how the votes are counted and how they could influence the outcome by casting some specific kind of vote). (There is a difference between ballots that include falsified opinions an ballots where the voter has just chosen one of the available different alternatives that are all equally sincere. In Approval one could say that any position of the approval cutoff is equally sincere as long as it separates a set of better candidates from a set of worse candidates (or alternatively one could require the cutoff to be in such place where there is a large gap between the utilities of the approved and non-approved candidates). In rated and ranked methods the sincere vote may be unique, and any deviation from that may be considered a falsified vote / insincere voting.) I think it depends on the society and its rules (and the method and election in question) if insincere voting is considered to be wrong or not. In many cases the society will benefit if insincere voting is generally not accepted. (Strategic voting can be accepted in elections where strategic voting is the agreed way to vote.) It's a reason that (in)sincere isn't very good terminology for everyday use; likewise manipulation. They're fine terms when well-defined and used in the context of social choice theory, but they carry a lot of baggage. A voter is, in my view, completely justified in ignoring the name of the election method (approval, for instance) and the instructions (vote in order of preference) and casting their vote strictly on the basis of how the ballot will be counted. (Which is why I'm partial to ordinal systems; it seems to me that I as a voter can pretty easily order candidates without considering strategy, whereas the decision of where to draw the line for Approval, or how to assign cardinal values to candidates, explicitly brings strategy into the picture.) Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Why I think IRV isn't a serious alternative
Topic is IRV vs Condorcet. My point last time was that easy races are no challenge to either. Now I concede that not all hard races are a challenge, but the few that IRV has handled do not guarantee that it will do all well, considering the opportunity for failure. DWK On Wed, 26 Nov 2008 18:48:38 -0500 Greg wrote: That is incorrect. There have been tight (not easy) elections where IRV chose the Condorcet winner. The recent Pierce County Executive and Assessor-Recorder races are two examples. Also, there's actually a decent amount of real world ranking data available. IRV data from San Francisco, Burlington, and Pierce County. STV data from Cambridge and Ireland. Preferential presidential polls from Ireland. And more. I'm in the process of making it all available online in a uniform format. Greg On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 6:22 PM, Dave Ketchum [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A good summary. If we only cared about the easy ones Plurality would be good enough. -- [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. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Why the concept of sincere votes in Range is flawed.
Hi Juho, --- En date de : Mer 26.11.08, Juho Laatu [EMAIL PROTECTED] a écrit : It is also far from obvious to me that Approval uniquely requires a strategic decision. In the EM discussions people seem to assume that at least one should put the cutoff between some leading candidates. People seldom talk about marking those candidates that one approves (I have seen this approach however in some mechanically generated ballots for simulations). Don't know about real life. Yes. But what I'm trying to do is attack the concept of sincerity and show that sincere vote doesn't mean anything without shared assumptions about how a ballot can represent sincere preferences. (And then I would want to point out that this question of interpretation has no effect on the properties of the method.) You can also argue either that FPP also asks for a strategic decision, or else that approval is supposed to refer to a real concept. FPP (or actually some society that uses FPP) could take the stance that voters are expected to pick one of the two leading candidates in a two-party country, which would make voting sincere. To say again, the idea of voting being sincere only means something if the person you're talking to has a shared concept of what this means in the context of FPP voting. You can easily deny that you have an internal concept of approval, but you can also deny that you have an internal transitive ranking of the candidates. Maybe it's harder to believe, but it can't be disproven. (Though, I don't really think it is harder to believe, since approval has a plain English meaning.) It seems that voting method Approval has cut its ties to English term approval (at least at the EM list). That's certainly so, but if I want to define a sincere Approval vote in terms of the plain English meaning of the term approval, it will be hard to show that I'm wrong. In ranking based methods EM people seem to assume that voters have some easy to identify transitive order of the candidates in their mind (=sincere opinion). I find it revealing that there is not much discussion on the possibility to cast non-transitive votes. Such votes would be strategically more efficient than the transitive ones. Use of transitive votes seem to reflect the idea that the sincere opinion of a rational voter would always be transitive. (Well, of course casting non-transitive votes would be technically more challenging.) There is a lot of consensus, and perhaps this makes it easier to assume that preferences map intuitively to votes as some kind of general principle. If we debate about Approval we will probably argue about what the sincere vote is, not whether Approval supports the concept at all. We would find a similar problem if we granted the idea of sincere cyclical preferences, and then wanted to analyze rank ballot methods and what sincerity must mean there. Kevin Venzke Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Why I think IRV isn't a serious alternative
Greg, When someone asks for examples of IRV not working well in practice, they are usually protesting against contrived examples of IRV's failures. Sure any method can be made to look ridiculous by some unlikely contrived scenario. I used to sympathize with that point of view until I started playing around with examples that seemed natural to me, and found that IRV's erratic behavior was fairly robust. You could vary the parameters quite a bit without shaking the bad behavior. But I didn't expect anybody but fellow mathematicians to be able to appreciate how generic the pathological behavior was, until ... ... until the advent of the Ka-Ping Lee and B. Olson diagrams, which show graphically the extent of the pathology even in the best of all possible worlds, namely normally distributed voting populations in no more than two dimensional issue space. These diagrams are not based upon contrived examples, but upon benefit-of-a-doubt assumptions. Even Borda looks good in these diagrams because voters are assumed to vote sincerely. Each diagram represents thousands of elections decided by normally distributed sincere voters. I cannot believe that anybody who supports IRV really understands these diagrams. Admittedly, it takes some effort to understand exactly what they represent, and I regret that the accompaning explanations are too abstract for the mathematically naive. They are a subtle way of displaying an immense amount of information. One way to make more concrete sense out of these diagrams is to pretend that each of the candidate dots actually represents a proposed building site, and that the purpose of each simulated election is to choose the site from among these options. Each of the other pixels in the diagram represents (by its color) the outcome the election would have (under the given method) if a normal distribution of voters were centered at that pixel. So each pixel of the diagram represents a different election, but with the same candidates (i.e. proposed construction sites). Different digrams explore the effect of moving the candidates around relative to each other, as well as increasing the number of candidates. With a little practice you can get a good feel for what each diagram represents, and what it says about the method it is pointed at (as a kind of electo-scope). On result is that IRV shows erratic behavior even in those diagrams where every pixel represents an election in which there is a Condorcet candidate. My Best, Forest gre Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Why the concept of sincere votes in Range is flawed.
--- On Thu, 27/11/08, Kevin Venzke [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: Kevin Venzke [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [EM] Why the concept of sincere votes in Range is flawed. To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thursday, 27 November, 2008, 3:25 AM Hi Juho, --- En date de : Mer 26.11.08, Juho Laatu [EMAIL PROTECTED] a écrit : It is also far from obvious to me that Approval uniquely requires a strategic decision. In the EM discussions people seem to assume that at least one should put the cutoff between some leading candidates. People seldom talk about marking those candidates that one approves (I have seen this approach however in some mechanically generated ballots for simulations). Don't know about real life. Yes. But what I'm trying to do is attack the concept of sincerity and show that sincere vote doesn't mean anything without shared assumptions about how a ballot can represent sincere preferences. (And then I would want to point out that this question of interpretation has no effect on the properties of the method.) Yes, it is good to handle the mechanics of the methods and the combination of the surrounding society and the method as separate topics. The society may have impact also on the performance of the method in the sense that if the society does not accept strategic voting (or it is just not widely spread) then the actual method may also perform much better in such a society than in some other one where strategic voting is the norm (voters may e.g. generally vote as told by the strategists of the parties). Juho You can also argue either that FPP also asks for a strategic decision, or else that approval is supposed to refer to a real concept. FPP (or actually some society that uses FPP) could take the stance that voters are expected to pick one of the two leading candidates in a two-party country, which would make voting sincere. To say again, the idea of voting being sincere only means something if the person you're talking to has a shared concept of what this means in the context of FPP voting. You can easily deny that you have an internal concept of approval, but you can also deny that you have an internal transitive ranking of the candidates. Maybe it's harder to believe, but it can't be disproven. (Though, I don't really think it is harder to believe, since approval has a plain English meaning.) It seems that voting method Approval has cut its ties to English term approval (at least at the EM list). That's certainly so, but if I want to define a sincere Approval vote in terms of the plain English meaning of the term approval, it will be hard to show that I'm wrong. In ranking based methods EM people seem to assume that voters have some easy to identify transitive order of the candidates in their mind (=sincere opinion). I find it revealing that there is not much discussion on the possibility to cast non-transitive votes. Such votes would be strategically more efficient than the transitive ones. Use of transitive votes seem to reflect the idea that the sincere opinion of a rational voter would always be transitive. (Well, of course casting non-transitive votes would be technically more challenging.) There is a lot of consensus, and perhaps this makes it easier to assume that preferences map intuitively to votes as some kind of general principle. If we debate about Approval we will probably argue about what the sincere vote is, not whether Approval supports the concept at all. We would find a similar problem if we granted the idea of sincere cyclical preferences, and then wanted to analyze rank ballot methods and what sincerity must mean there. Kevin Venzke Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
