Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
Juho, That was a good summary of IRV and Condorcet dynamics, and how their different weaknesses might be perceived by a citizenry. I would like to add one more to your list. Different voting systems provide different incentives for candidate behavior and campaigns and thus voter information. It has been argued that IRV tends to reduce negative campaigning, or makes campaigns overly bland (depending on your stance), because in addition to seeking first choices, candidates want to reach out to the supporters of other candidates. However, with Condorcet rules, it is possible for a candidate to win in a crowded field while receiving no first choices at all. There haven't been any real-world high-stakes elections to know for certain what effect this might have, but it would seem reasonable to expect candidates to avoid taking stands on controversial issues. Candidates would have an incentive to campaign just using a vacant theme of I promise to listen to YOU. IRV seems to strike a reasonable balance between appealing for a strong core of supporters (the only requirement in a plurality election with many candidates) and also developing broad appeal as an alternate choice. Condorcet tips towards the broad appeal alone. Condorcet would seem to encourage candidates to simply avoid alienating anybody, with little need to develop strong core support. Thus, I wonder if Condorcet would dumb down campaigns to the point that voters would have even less information to evaluate candidates by. A candidate who flew below the radar, such that no voters had any negative opinions of the person, just might win, even if finishing in last place in terms of first choices. I suspect the voters wouldn't be happy, even though that was the logical result of their ballots. Terry Bouricius - Original Message - From: Juho juho4...@yahoo.co.uk To: EM Methods election-methods@lists.electorama.com Sent: Wednesday, January 13, 2010 4:49 AM Subject: Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality On Jan 13, 2010, at 9:14 AM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: it still is a curiosity to me how, historically, some leaders and proponents of election reform thunked up the idea to have a ranked- order ballot and then took that good idea and married it to the IRV protocol. with the 200 year old Condorcet idea in existence, why would they do that? 1) The basic idea of IRV is in some sense natural. It is like a street fight. The weakest players are regularly kicked out and they must give up. I'm not saying that this would lead to good results but at least this game is understandable to most people. Condorcet on the other hand is more like a mathematical equation, and the details of the most complex Condorcet variants may be too much for most voters. Here I'm not saying that each voter (and not even each legislator) should understand all the details of their voting system. The basic Condorcet winner rule is however a simple enough principle to be explained to all. But it may be that IRV is easier to market (to the legislators and voters) from this point of view. 2) IRV is easier to count manually. Condorcet gets quite tedious to count manually when the number of candidates and voters goes up. One can use some tricks and shortcuts to speed up manual Condorcet counting but IRV probably still beats it from this point of view. Manual counting was the only way to count for a long time. Nowadays we have computers and Condorcet tabulation should thus be no problem at all (at least in places where computers are available). But this is one reason why IRV has taken an early lead. 3) Large parties are typically in a key role when electoral reforms are made. Election method experts within those parties may well have found out that IRV tends to favour large parties. In addition to trying to improve the society the best way they can, political parties and people within them also tend to think that they are the ones who are right and therefore the society would benefit of just them being in power and getting more votes and more seats. The parties and their representatives may also have other more selfish drivers behind their interest to grab as large share of the power as possible :-). IRV thus seems to maintain the power of the current strongest players better than Condorcet does, and that may mean some bias towards IRV. 4) The problems of different election methods may appear only later. A superficial understanding of IRV reveals first its positive features. Like in Burlington the negative features may be understood only after something negative happens in real elections. This applies also to Condorcet. On that side one may however live in the hope that the problems are rare enough and not easy to take advantage of so that sincere voting and good results would be dominant. The point is that IRV may be taken into use first (see other points above and below) without understanding what problems might emerge later. And once it has been taken
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
At 09:30 AM 1/13/2010, Terry Bouricius wrote: Juho, That was a good summary of IRV and Condorcet dynamics, and how their different weaknesses might be perceived by a citizenry. I would like to add one more to your list. Different voting systems provide different incentives for candidate behavior and campaigns and thus voter information. Indeed. And, in fact, this is one reason why Plurality *often* works much better than voting systems theorists would expect. And why Top-Two runoff does likewise (and even better). It has been argued that IRV tends to reduce negative campaigning, or makes campaigns overly bland (depending on your stance), because in addition to seeking first choices, candidates want to reach out to the supporters of other candidates. It's been argued, for sure, but it's never been shown. What happens is that minor candidates with no hope do cooperate, but this incentive actually operates in the other direction for frontrunners, it seems. However, with Condorcet rules, it is possible for a candidate to win in a crowded field while receiving no first choices at all. Horrors! The candidate must really be bad, not even his or her mother votes for him, nor, indeed, does the candidate vote for himself or herself. I love these objections to voting methods that are based on utterly preposterous scenarios and expected knee-jerk responses to them. However, there is a legitimate point here, let's look at it. There haven't been any real-world high-stakes elections to know for certain what effect this might have, but it would seem reasonable to expect candidates to avoid taking stands on controversial issues. No, actually, at least not more than happens at present, where candidates try to avoid opposing the positions of large blocks of the public, and will attempt to present themselves differently to different interest groups, whenever they think they can get away with it. The problem is that if you make yourself as bland as possible, you will lose your support base, those highly motivated to turn out and vote for you, work for your election as a volunteer, contribute funds to help you gain name recognition, etc. Fatal under most realistic voting systems, including Range, IRV, etc. Candidates would have an incentive to campaign just using a vacant theme of I promise to listen to YOU. This is supposed to be new and only hypothetical? Sorry, Terry, I vote against candidates like that, and I think I'm not alone. I'll vote for a candidate whom I *actually trust* to listen to the constiuents, but not one who will not disclose his or her own position, because I can't trust the latter to vote intelligently and honestly. I don't want a rubber stamp in a legislature or office, I want someone who will not only listen, but make reasonably decent decisions as well, *after* having listened. Someone who won't tell me what they think, who avoids revealing personal positions, that's a very big negative for me. Unfortunately, the present systems encourage exactly this. IRV seems to strike a reasonable balance between appealing for a strong core of supporters (the only requirement in a plurality election with many candidates) and also developing broad appeal as an alternate choice. The problem is that a political expedient is mistaken for a desirable quality. And it's just plain bullshit. IRV favors extremists, not centrists. And not *real* centrists. I'm afraid that Terry is reasoning backwards. He's long worked for IRV, so he is making up reasons why it's a good method, a reasonable balance, even though anyone who has studied voting systems without this kind of activist bias knows that IRV performs far from reasonably. To be clear, IRV does not favor serious extremists, but rather it is known to foster a two-party system, where any minor parties are mere appendages to a major party, and tend not to last. Terry focuses, in his comment, on individual candidates and how they will comport themselves, but probably most voters where parties are involved vote based on general party affiliation as as strong a factor as individual promises. As has been amply explained in this excellent video, http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/VotingFreeLecture.aspx, when there are two parties, they are strongly motivated to position themselves near the median voter, i.e., such that their range of supporters are to one side or the other of the median. Candidates, in primary elections or other internal party process, will be motivated to position themselves at the median of the party, so, thinking of this as a linear spectrum, at 25%; but this is modified by considerations of electability, so the push will be up, toward the middle. Then, once nominated, they will attempt to present themselves as even closer to the median. A third party attempting to rise up in the middle gets slaughtered under IRV, through center squeeze, so that's next to impossible. IRV is only
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
At 01:19 PM 1/11/2010, Dave Ketchum wrote: Plurality does that only when you vote for one who has a possibility of winning. Sometimes doing that prevents voting for the one you prefer but expect to lose. There is an aspect of this which is often overlooked, amidst assumptions about what voters prefer, and the 2000 presidential elector election in Florida showed this, in fact. Everybody assumes that the Nader voters preferred Gore. But our study of Range voting, if it's shown us anything, it should show us that preference strength matters. There is something that is quite obvious: the Nader voters didn't have enough preference strength between Gore and Bush to counterbalance their desire to express their preference for Nader. Gore did not own those votes. I know of another interest group that also, I'm sure, shifted that election (it was so close that this could be said about many groups.) Muslims. There was a political action group that became active in 2000, for that election, and it approached the Gore campaign and asked to meet. They were blown off. The Bush campaign agreed to meet with them, and did. Now, which candidate did they support? Lucky guess. And it is a near certainty that this shifted enough votes to cause Gore to lose. Preference strength. Very important to consider, much about voting systems makes no sense if all we think about is raw preference. Sure, in a head-on election, no other candidates, Gore would probably have won. Or not. Because the Nader message was that the choice between Gore and Bush did not matter. The Nader votes presumably agreed with that, and so we can't assume that they were prevented from voting for the one they preferred. They did so vote, and the result was presumably not unsatisfactory to them, not immediately anyway. Later, they found out whether Nader was right or not. What would make us think that, with Range Voting, these voters wouldn't have bottom ranked both Gore and Bush? Well, here's what: voters don't believe everything that their candidates tell them! But, still, each one of them made that choice on election day, as to which benefit was more important: showing support for Nader or the Green Party, or electing the preferred frontrunner. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
On Jan 13, 2010, at 4:13 PM, Dave Ketchum wrote: On Jan 13, 2010, at 4:49 AM, Juho wrote: On Jan 13, 2010, at 9:14 AM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: it still is a curiosity to me how, historically, some leaders and proponents of election reform thunked up the idea to have a ranked-order ballot and then took that good idea and married it to the IRV protocol. with the 200 year old Condorcet idea in existence, why would they do that? 1) The basic idea of IRV is in some sense natural. It is like a street fight. The weakest players are regularly kicked out and they must give up. I'm not saying that this would lead to good results but at least this game is understandable to most people. Condorcet on the other hand is more like a mathematical equation, and the details of the most complex Condorcet variants may be too much for most voters. Here I'm not saying that each voter (and not even each legislator) should understand all the details of their voting system. The basic Condorcet winner rule is however a simple enough principle to be explained to all. But it may be that IRV is easier to market (to the legislators and voters) from this point of view. When there is a CW in Condorcet, the CW has won in comparison with each other candidate. While a few may like X or Z enough better to have given such top ranking, the fact that all the voters together prefer the CW over each other should count, and does with Condorcet. This seems to me to be a claim that is at best not self-evident (in the sense that Pareto or anti-dictatorship, say, are). While I'm not a fan of cardinal-utility voting systems, it seems entirely possible to make a utility argument or rationale against the *necessity* of electing the CW in all cases. That is, as a thought experiment, if we could somehow divine a workable electorate-wide utility function, it's at least arguable that the utility winner would legitimately trump the Condorcet winner, if different, while you couldn't make a similar argument wrt Pareto or dictatorship. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
On Jan 13, 2010, at 7:57 PM, Jonathan Lundell wrote: On Jan 13, 2010, at 4:13 PM, Dave Ketchum wrote: On Jan 13, 2010, at 4:49 AM, Juho wrote: On Jan 13, 2010, at 9:14 AM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: it still is a curiosity to me how, historically, some leaders and proponents of election reform thunked up the idea to have a ranked-order ballot and then took that good idea and married it to the IRV protocol. with the 200 year old Condorcet idea in existence, why would they do that? 1) The basic idea of IRV is in some sense natural. It is like a street fight. The weakest players are regularly kicked out and they must give up. I'm not saying that this would lead to good results but at least this game is understandable to most people. Condorcet on the other hand is more like a mathematical equation, and the details of the most complex Condorcet variants may be too much for most voters. Here I'm not saying that each voter (and not even each legislator) should understand all the details of their voting system. The basic Condorcet winner rule is however a simple enough principle to be explained to all. But it may be that IRV is easier to market (to the legislators and voters) from this point of view. When there is a CW in Condorcet, the CW has won in comparison with each other candidate. While a few may like X or Z enough better to have given such top ranking, the fact that all the voters together prefer the CW over each other should count, and does with Condorcet. This seems to me to be a claim that is at best not self-evident (in the sense that Pareto or anti-dictatorship, say, are). While I'm not a fan of cardinal-utility voting systems, it seems entirely possible to make a utility argument or rationale against the *necessity* of electing the CW in all cases. That is, as a thought experiment, if we could somehow divine a workable electorate-wide utility function, it's at least arguable that the utility winner would legitimately trump the Condorcet winner, if different, while you couldn't make a similar argument wrt Pareto or dictatorship. how would you define that utility function metric in a democracy? would the candidates arm-wrestle? take a written exam? flip a coin? what, other than majority preference of the electorate, can be such a metric in a democracy? -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] Two simple alternative voting methods that are fairer than IRV/STV and lack most IRV/STV flaws
For those who need a system for substituting for a top-two runoff election, I devised two fair methods to suggest to her that do not have all the flaws of IRV/STV. (They both may've been devised by others before me. My goal was to create a fair method without IRV/STV's flaws which solve the problem of one person/one vote which is necessary to get a voting method approved by US courts. -- I believe that these alternative systems (below) are also susceptible to the spoiler effect of a nonwinning candidate changing who wins the election, although I believe that there is a significant difference between the alternative methods below and plurality and IRV where a majority opposed candidate may win the election. In other words, I believe that the winner due to a spoiler in the alternative method below is more likely to be a majority favorite. Both methods below solve the problem of every voter having a vote of value one and, unlike IRV, treat all voters alike by counting all their choices So, here are two possible methods that are fairer than IRV/STV and which are monotonic (unlike IRV/STV): 1. A rank choice ballot method: Any number of candidates may be running for office and any number allowed to be ranked on the ballot. Voter ranks one candidate vote =1 Voter ranks two candidates, denominator is 1+2 = 3 votes are worth 2/3 and 1/3 for first and second ranked candidates Voter ranks three candidates, denominator is 1+2+3=6 votes are worth 3/6 and 2/6 and 1/6 for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice respectively Voter ranks four candidates, denominator is 1+2+3+4=10 votes are worth 4/10, 3/10, 2/10, and 1/10 for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd and 4th choice respectively ETC. Just follow the same pattern 2. A point system where a total number of points per voter per contest may be allocated by the voter to any of the candidates running for office: Two candidates running for office, give all voters 2+1=3 votes to cast. They may cast all three votes for one candidate or split the votes any way between the two. Three candidates running for office, give all voters 3+2+1=6 votes to cast. They may cast all six votes for one candidate or split the votes any way they like between the three. Four candidates running for office, give all voters 4+3+2+1=10 votes to cast. They may cast all ten votes for one candidate or split the votes any way they like between the four. Five candidates running for office, give all voters 5+4+3+2+1=15 votes to cast. They may cast all 15 votes for one candidate or split the votes any way they like. The benefits of this system are that it: a. gives the voters more flexibility than plan #1 above as far as weighting the individual candidates b. is easy to assure that all voters contribute 1 total vote during the process by dividing each vote by the total number of votes allowed for each voter for each contest. It would, however, require educating each voter to make sure to use all the points available in any one contest though. The advantage of these two methods over IRV/STV include: 1. easy to count, precinct-summable (unlike IRV) 2. fair, treats all voters' votes equally by counting all choices of each voter (unlike IRV) 3. gives each voter a total of one vote total over the entire vote counting process satisfying the US courts (unlike IRV) 4. is monotonic -- preserves the right to cast a vote that has a positive affect on a candidate's chances of winning (unlike IRV.) 5. Allows all voters to participate in all the rounds since these methods require only one (1) round (unlike IRV) 6. can begin the counting immediately without waiting for all the late-counted provisional and absentee ballots to be ready to count (without fear of having to restart the entire process again from the beginning unlike with IRV/STV) -- Kathy Dopp Town of Colonie, NY 12304 phone 518-952-4030 cell 518-505-0220 http://utahcountvotes.org http://electionmathematics.org http://kathydopp.com/serendipity/ Realities Mar Instant Runoff Voting http://electionmathematics.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/InstantRunoffVotingFlaws.pdf Voters Have Reason to Worry http://utahcountvotes.org/UT/UtahCountVotes-ThadHall-Response.pdf Checking election outcome accuracy --- Post-election audit sampling http://electionmathematics.org/em-audits/US/PEAuditSamplingMethods.pdf -- Kathy Dopp Town of Colonie, NY 12304 phone 518-952-4030 cell 518-505-0220 http://utahcountvotes.org http://electionmathematics.org http://kathydopp.com/serendipity/ Realities Mar Instant Runoff Voting http://electionmathematics.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/InstantRunoffVotingFlaws.pdf Voters Have Reason to Worry http://utahcountvotes.org/UT/UtahCountVotes-ThadHall-Response.pdf Checking election outcome accuracy --- Post-election audit sampling http://electionmathematics.org/em-audits/US/PEAuditSamplingMethods.pdf Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
On Jan 13, 2010, at 5:02 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On Jan 13, 2010, at 7:57 PM, Jonathan Lundell wrote: On Jan 13, 2010, at 4:13 PM, Dave Ketchum wrote: On Jan 13, 2010, at 4:49 AM, Juho wrote: On Jan 13, 2010, at 9:14 AM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: it still is a curiosity to me how, historically, some leaders and proponents of election reform thunked up the idea to have a ranked-order ballot and then took that good idea and married it to the IRV protocol. with the 200 year old Condorcet idea in existence, why would they do that? 1) The basic idea of IRV is in some sense natural. It is like a street fight. The weakest players are regularly kicked out and they must give up. I'm not saying that this would lead to good results but at least this game is understandable to most people. Condorcet on the other hand is more like a mathematical equation, and the details of the most complex Condorcet variants may be too much for most voters. Here I'm not saying that each voter (and not even each legislator) should understand all the details of their voting system. The basic Condorcet winner rule is however a simple enough principle to be explained to all. But it may be that IRV is easier to market (to the legislators and voters) from this point of view. When there is a CW in Condorcet, the CW has won in comparison with each other candidate. While a few may like X or Z enough better to have given such top ranking, the fact that all the voters together prefer the CW over each other should count, and does with Condorcet. This seems to me to be a claim that is at best not self-evident (in the sense that Pareto or anti-dictatorship, say, are). While I'm not a fan of cardinal-utility voting systems, it seems entirely possible to make a utility argument or rationale against the *necessity* of electing the CW in all cases. That is, as a thought experiment, if we could somehow divine a workable electorate-wide utility function, it's at least arguable that the utility winner would legitimately trump the Condorcet winner, if different, while you couldn't make a similar argument wrt Pareto or dictatorship. how would you define that utility function metric in a democracy? would the candidates arm-wrestle? take a written exam? flip a coin? what, other than majority preference of the electorate, can be such a metric in a democracy? I don't think you can, and that's a big problem for Range, it seem to me. But we're talking about utility for the voter, not arm-strength of the candidates. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Two simple alternative voting methods that are fairer than IRV/STV and lack most IRV/STV flaws
On Jan 13, 2010, at 8:06 PM, Kathy Dopp wrote: 1. A rank choice ballot method: Any number of candidates may be running for office and any number allowed to be ranked on the ballot. Voter ranks one candidate vote =1 Voter ranks two candidates, denominator is 1+2 = 3 votes are worth 2/3 and 1/3 for first and second ranked candidates Voter ranks three candidates, denominator is 1+2+3=6 votes are worth 3/6 and 2/6 and 1/6 for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice respectively Voter ranks four candidates, denominator is 1+2+3+4=10 votes are worth 4/10, 3/10, 2/10, and 1/10 for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd and 4th choice respectively ETC. Just follow the same pattern This sounds like a variation on Borda count, but with an incentive to vote on fewer candidates. With smaller and smaller votes as I give more information, I should vote for one _maybe_ two choices. Why would I want to give my favorite a 4/10 vote when I could give them a 2/3 vote or a 1.0 vote? This is the wrong incentive. Giving more information on the ballot should be encouraged. 2. A point system where a total number of points per voter per contest may be allocated by the voter to any of the candidates running for office: Two candidates running for office, give all voters 2+1=3 votes to cast. They may cast all three votes for one candidate or split the votes any way between the two. Three candidates running for office, give all voters 3+2+1=6 votes to cast. They may cast all six votes for one candidate or split the votes any way they like between the three. Four candidates running for office, give all voters 4+3+2+1=10 votes to cast. They may cast all ten votes for one candidate or split the votes any way they like between the four. Five candidates running for office, give all voters 5+4+3+2+1=15 votes to cast. They may cast all 15 votes for one candidate or split the votes any way they like. This is equivalent to any other normalized ratings ballot. People vote ratings, but they all have the same voting power, either by straight sum of ratings or by geometric distance or something. In any system where the voter has to allocate the points themselves, there will be nasty strategic thinking going on to try and allocate the points best. If I vote simply and honestly, allocating points in alignment with how I feel about candidates, points not in differential between the top two candidates are wasted. Kathy, in my investigations of election methods, I started with straight rating summation as optimal, but normalized ratings as more fair, but then ran into the wasted-vote problem and settled on Instant Runoff Normalized Ratings ( http://bolson.org/voting/methods.html#IRNR ). Over the course of rounds of counting it reallocates your vote based on your original ballot to always be optimally applied to the choices available. Never mind the Instant Runoff part of the name, by using ratings ballots and considering the whole ballot at once, it's much better than the simplistic IRV. It's much less non-monotonic than IRV, and gets better answers in my simulations. You can compare the relative non-monotonic areas in these election space plots: http://bolson.org/voting/sim_one_seat/www/ http://bolson.org/voting/sim_one_seat/www/4a_IRV.png http://bolson.org/voting/sim_one_seat/www/4a_IRNR.png http://bolson.org/voting/sim_one_seat/www/4a_Condorcet.png Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
At 07:10 PM 1/11/2010, Dave Ketchum wrote: The possible excitement tangles with the secrecy laws - reporting in a manner that identifies how ANY ONE voter voted needs preventing (needed protection of voters). There is a problem with ranked ballots and true write-in votes: a voter may identify the ballot specifically and clearly. The voter writes in their own name. In last rank, that has practically no effect. With plurality, the write-in shows, but it then makes the ballot moot, generally. (If it's unique, it's moot!) Vote-coercers don't want the person to vote for themselves! And a mark in any other place than the write-in place invalidates the ballot, and any writing in the write-in -- any at all -- generally invalidates a vote for any other candidate. Because Asset Voting shares this problem in a different way, my solution was to consider that true write-ins are not allowed. Rather, there is a candidate pamphlet that is printed with the name of all registered candidates. The registration fee is nominal, just enough to pay for a listing in the pamphlet with a unique name and a code to be used to vote for the candidate. There are no names on the ballot. The voter has to find the name (unless the voter is assisted, which is allowed often for people with physical difficulties). The ballot only has a number on it, marked in a way that would be difficult to specifically identify. With computer ballots, it's even easier. And there could be a look-up for the number so that the actual name of the candidate was displayed. But it's still possible to identify ballots with very high probability. Perfect secrecy in voting is not possible to guarantee, for, usually, the risk comes from those with special access to ballots. I.e., incumbents. They can set up means to identify voters, easily, with that control. I'll note that in some democracies, each ballot is serialized on the back and this serial number is recorded with the original voting record. You can't tell who voted just by looking at the ballot, you'd have to also have list to the registry of votes made at the voting place. And when ballots are counted, this side is normally kept down. So the protection that is practical and perhaps necessary is that it is kept *difficult* to identify a vote from a voter who does not want to be identified. With fully-ranked ballots with enough candidates, it is also possible for a voter to vote, say, for a candidate in first preference and then use the remaining preferences to create a unique code, even if write-ins are not allowed. In San Francisco, one supervisor race had, what, 23 candidates on the ballot? Overvoting in lower ranks is moot in first rank and doesn't affect the first preference vote at all with IRV. So that's a code with 22 possibilities, even neglecting write-ins, for each of the ranking slots, and blanks can be used as well as part of the code. So there would be 23^22 possible codes. It would definitely be suspicious if many voters used more than a few double-votes. Still, what could they do about it? As it is, write-ins *must* be allowed in every election by the California constitution, and the exception for some runoff elections was a result of an argument that the runoff wasn't a separate election, it was merely part of the first one. But that argument was totally stupid! Remember, the argument was that the winner *must* get a majority. A majority of votes! A majority of *what* votes? If the whole process is one election, it would have to be a majority of all the votes cast in the primary and runoff. But obviously, that's not it. Rather, it's a majority of votes in the runoff. It's a separate election, the only one that counts, if the first one didn't find a majority. All the votes cast in the first election are moot except for determining who is on the ballot. And thus the allowance for write-ins should have remained, and, if the method remained plurality, a plurality winner would have been allowed in the runoff. Simple. Don't run in a plurality runoff election unless as a write-in unless you are willing to risk a spoiler effect. You already know, probably, how you stand with the voters. And if I were a voter seeing a write-in candidacy, I'd want to know that not only do I prefer this write-in candidate, by a substantial margin, but also a plurality of voters prefer this candidate. I'd want to know, clearly, that there was a center squeeze effect in the primary. Runoff voting is quite cool for minor parties, it allows them to express that first preference with reasonable sincerity, usually. Give voters a better method in the primary, and there will be fewer runoffs and better results with sincere voting. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Two simple alternative voting methods that are fairer than IRV/STV and lack most IRV/STV flaws
On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 8:55 PM, election-methods-requ...@lists.electorama.com wrote: Send Election-Methods mailing list submissions to election-meth...@lists.electorama.com To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://lists.electorama.com/listinfo.cgi/election-methods-electorama.com or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to election-methods-requ...@lists.electorama.com Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 20:30:26 -0500 From: Brian Olson b...@bolson.org To: Election Methods Mailing List election-meth...@electorama.com Subject: Re: [EM] Two simple alternative voting methods that are fairer than IRV/STV and lack most IRV/STV flaws On Jan 13, 2010, at 8:06 PM, Kathy Dopp wrote: 1. A rank choice ballot method: Any number of candidates may be running for office and any number allowed to be ranked on the ballot. Voter ranks one candidate vote =1 Voter ranks two candidates, denominator is 1+2 = 3 votes are worth 2/3 and 1/3 for first and second ranked candidates Voter ranks three candidates, denominator is 1+2+3=6 votes are worth 3/6 and 2/6 and 1/6 for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice respectively Voter ranks four candidates, denominator is 1+2+3+4=10 votes are worth 4/10, 3/10, 2/10, and 1/10 for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd and 4th choice respectively ETC. Just follow the same pattern This sounds like a variation on Borda count, but with an incentive to vote on fewer candidates. Yes perhaps, but normalized to give a value of one in total to all ballots since Borda was rejected by the MN Supreme court as violating one-person/one-vote. With smaller and smaller votes as I give more information, I should vote for one _maybe_ two choices. Why would I want to give my favorite a 4/10 vote when I could give them a 2/3 vote or a 1.0 vote? This is the wrong incentive. Giving more information on the ballot should be encouraged. Yes. Probably. It depends on how attached to your first choice you are. 2. A point system where a total number of points per voter per contest may be allocated by the voter to any of the candidates running for office: Two candidates running for office, give all voters 2+1=3 votes to cast. They may cast all three votes for one candidate or split the votes any way between the two. Three candidates running for office, give all voters 3+2+1=6 votes to cast. They may cast all six votes for one candidate or split the votes any way they like between the three. Four candidates running for office, give all voters 4+3+2+1=10 votes to cast. They may cast all ten votes for one candidate or split the votes any way they like between the four. Five candidates running for office, give all voters 5+4+3+2+1=15 votes to cast. They may cast all 15 votes for one candidate or split the votes any way they like. This is equivalent to any other normalized ratings ballot. People vote ratings, but they all have the same voting power, either by straight sum of ratings or by geometric distance or something. Yes. It just standardizes the number of points and makes it seem fair (an equal number of points) to voters who would not understand the normalization process if all voters were allowed to cast a different number of votes initially. It also simplifies the calculation and makes it much easier for the public to check. In any system where the voter has to allocate the points themselves, there will be nasty strategic thinking going on to try and allocate the points best. If I vote simply and honestly, allocating points in alignment with how I feel about candidates, points not in differential between the top two candidates are wasted. That's a good argument for the first method I suggested since all the voter has to do is rank as many candidates as they feel like ranking, but knowing that the 2nd and 3rd, etc. choices will add points that count against the voter's 1st choice, and may therefore cause the 2nd or 3rd choice to win instead being more popular with other voters. Kathy, in my investigations of election methods, I started with straight rating summation as optimal, but normalized ratings as more fair, but then ran into the wasted-vote problem and settled on Instant Runoff Normalized Ratings ( http://bolson.org/voting/methods.html#IRNR ). I agree that that method is much fairer than IRV/STV but it is too complex to count and is not precinct-summable which raises other election administration problems and also auditability problems, so it is not a method I'd choose even though it is far better than the typical IRV/STV. Over the course of rounds of counting it reallocates your vote based on your original ballot to always be optimally applied to the choices available. Never mind the Instant Runoff part of the name, by using ratings ballots and considering the whole ballot at once, it's much better than the simplistic IRV. It's much less non-monotonic than IRV, and gets better
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
At 02:14 AM 1/13/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote: For instance in Aspen CO's most recent IRV election, if 75 *fewer* voters had voted for one candidate that candidate would have won. that's a pathology (and sounds like a worse one than Burlington VT in 2009). so let's get rid of it. but *throwing* *away* information by reverting to the single-vote ballot from the ranked ballot doesn't make things better. it makes it worse for the majority. The alternative generally is not pure plurality, it's some kind of runoff voting. The candidate must gain a certain plurality or a majority in the primary, or a runoff is held. The method for determining who gets on the runoff ballot is not necessarily the best; IRV flops because it's possible that the majority preference (pairwise) is third or even lower in first rank, and is eliminated. In the real examples I've seen, by the way, the majority preference was only a little behind the runner-up when eliminated. FairVote, in defending IRV against the center squeeze objection, makes it seem like the majority preference doesn't have core support. Really, and usually, the core support is roughly equivalent to the runner-up. And core support and Later-No-Harm are a Bad Idea, for they reward partisan thinking, allowing compromise only after the first choice is dead, eliminated, impossible. Now, suppose I have two choices: I can run my ballot as IRV, in which case my second choice doesn't count until my first choice is actually taken out back and shot, er, my first choice is eliminated, or I can run by ballot as Bucklin, in which case my first choice is the only one counted in the first round, but my lower ranked choices are counted in the round I've indicated. I could even leave an intermediate rank empty, so my second choice is only counted in the final round. Or second choices, plural. (Traditional Duluth Bucklin allowed multiple votes in the last rank but not in earlier ones; I'd allow them in all ranks, no reason not to, and it makes the method more flexible, my guess it would slightly improve result quality, but it would definitely decrease spoiled ballots.) The voter wanting Later No Harm protection would indicate on the ballot that it's an IRV ballot. This means that lower-ranked votes on that ballot would never count against the election of a higher-ranked candidate. They would not be counted until the candidate were eliminated. So the ballot would be run as a Bucklin ballot, with only one vote on it, the first rank. Then, if no Bucklin majority appeared (which is a true majority), there would be an instant runoff. The votes from all ranks on Bucklin ballots would stand. They would not be eliminated. But the ballots from the IRV voters would be treated as IRV ballots, and the candidate in first preference on them, with the lowest vote count so far, would have those votes struck, in effect, and the highest ranked votes standing would be counted. Note that if all voters vote IRV ballots, the election becomes pure IRV and if all voters vote Bucklin ballots, the election becomes pure Bucklin. In all cases, single winner election, the only vote on a ballot that actually counts is a vote for the winner. All other votes are moot, in the end, they could be struck and the result would not change. If the Later No Harm argument were truly valid, surely most voters would want to vote that way. But I sure wouldn't, because preventing harm to my candidate from my second rank vote also prevents help for my candidate from other voters who would vote for my favorite in second rank. Rather, to understand the situation, we should encourage people to look at repeated balloting as a very old and justly respected voting method. This is repeated balloting with no eliminations, it provides complete freedom to the voters, they can vote for their favorite without regard for what others think as long as they want. But if they keep doing that, and many keep doing that, the election won't resolve and they have to keep casting ballots, it's a form of selfishness that reaches a natural boundary. So what happens, in effect, is that voters lower their expectations and accept a result that they personally consider less than idea, but adequate and necessary in order to complete the election with a majority. It's totally obvious that this method could be made a bit more efficient by allowing multiple approvals. Repeated approval elections with no eliminations is probably somewhat more efficient than repeated elections allowing only a vote for one candidate, as voters will begin, perhaps, with some level of minor compromise, and they can then lower the approval cutoff as necessary. Or if they have a clear favorite, that's how they start until they have more information about what is practical. Bucklin simulates repeated balloting with a declining approval cutoff. An initial single preference vote is complemented by an
