[EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
(Second try. It seems that the first message didn't get through.) Here are some comments to multiple mails in this stream. On Apr 27, 2010, at 2:45 AM, I wrote: Draft of a method: - collect ranked votes - use Condorcet to determine P (Condorcet tends to elect a compromise candidate that all voters find reasonably good) - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect the group of P and VPs (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect members of the board (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P and VPs will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) One could elect P and VPs also later. In that case one could elect them from the members of the (already existing) board. Otherwise the process would be similar. If one needs to elect new members to the board to replace old ones one could use the old ballots + special rules that will not eliminate any of the sitting board members. On Apr 27, 2010, at 9:19 AM, Jameson Quinn wrote: Why not: - ranked votes - STV for council. Keep track of which members are elected first and second, one of them will be VP. - Condorcet winner among the councilmembers is P. (You could use original ballots or have the council revote.) - VP is first councilmember, or, if that person is P, second councilmember. This method picks P and VP among the candidates that would be elected as council/board members. You assume that there is only one VP. We could have also two and keep track of which members are elected first, second and third. The election of the VPs differs from my draft where the quota for council election is different from the quota for electing P+VPs. This may lead e.g. to electing VPs in a non-proportional way from some small groups that have only one candidate (while the larger groupings distribute their first preference votes to several candidates). On Apr 27, 2010, at 11:36 AM, Peter Zbornik wrote: I would prefer to have the P. elected by the same people electing the board. The P. is indeed the person most often representing the party on the outside. Ok, to be included in the requirements. On Apr 27, 2010, at 2:55 PM, Raph Frank wrote: On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 1:54 AM, Juho wrote: A fully separate P election would make the board less proportional - unless the elected P would have voting power only if he/she is already a member of the board. I think if there are a reasonable number of members, then the non-proportionality will only be slight. In a competitive political environment often also one member makes a big difference, and more so if the size of the board / council is small. This election is however within a party and I have understood that there are no clearly defined segments within the party, so the competitiveness is probably not as heavy as in an environment with clear border lines between parties. (I leave it to the Czech Green party to decide how accurate proportionality they want.) I think both the President and VP should be centerists. The President should definitely be a centerist, so making the VP a non-centerist gives that faction more power. I think this is not in line with the targets that Peter Zbornik gave. The set of P+VPs should be proportional. I proposed to elect a centrist P but complement that by electing the VPs so that the whole team becomes proportional (as much as possible after possibly electing a P from a small but widely approved grouping). Each voter casts a ranked ballot 1) The condorcet winner becomes President 2) The runner-up becomes Vice-President 3) Use PR-STV to elect the remainder of the council This is simple and doesn't does require special rules to protect from elimination. The same ballots are just processed three times. This method has the benefit of simplicity but P+VPs and the council are not proportional. (The council is to some extent proportional but not fully, depending on the size of the council and the number of P +VPs.) On Apr 27, 2010, at 3:01 PM, Raph Frank wrote: On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 7:19 AM, Jameson Quinn > wrote: Why not: - ranked votes - STV for council. Keep track of which members are elected first and second, one of them will be VP. - Condorcet winner among the councilmembers is P. (You could use original ballots or have the council revote.) - VP is first councilmember, or, if that person is P, second councilmember. The order of election with PR-STV shouldn't be used to determine VP, all seats are equal. However, I think your idea to run condorcet after the PR-STV election is a good idea. I would change it to: - ranked ballots - PR-STV elects the council - Excluding non-elected candidates -- Condorcet winner is President -- Condorcet runner-up is Vice President Here the set of P+VPs is not proportional
Re: [EM] A monotonic DSV method for Range
I like this method a lot. I think that some kind of range-based DSV is probably the ideal system, as long as it's not too much work for the voters in question. (I favor Bucklin for similar reasons - it can be seen as an unsophisticated, but extremely easy, form of DSV). I don't have much more to say about the method. But I do have one comment on your justification: To see how this works, think of a voter located in issue space > This explanation did help me understand the method. However, it's important to remember that any simple (unweighted) issue space analysis, by nature, ignores the possibility of condorcet ties, because they can't exist in unweighted issue space. That means the task is just to choose the candidate whose Dirchlet set includes the median voter - and there's a lot of methods which do that, at least with honest voters. The real test of a DSV method is how it handles Condorcet ties. Essentially, I think that the object of a DSV should be to minimize honest voter regret about how their virtual DSV ballot was counted - that is, minimize the pressure for a dishonest strategy. You can define regret variously, I'd define it to include a product of how dishonest/risky the voters' better strategy would have been, and the utility benefit they would have gotten. Note that both of these numbers are definite, not probabilistic - there is a definite winner now, and there would be a definite winner for any cabal strategy. I don't really understand how this system would react to a Condorcet tie - it seems it would depend all-too-much on whether one of the top candidate's first choice votes were minimized by the shadow of a near-clone who was not part of the Condorcet tie. > > Note that our new method MPASRV automatically respects top and bottom > ratings, > so voters who think they have a better strategy can control their own > approvals > and disapprovals. > > Well, it's better than the alternative, but I wouldn't exactly crow about this. The aim of a DSV is to minimize the need for strategy and thus minimize its use; the fact that a system allows strategy just falls out of some combination of Arrow's criteria passed. JQ Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] A monotonic DSV method for Range
This method is an attempt to adapt WMA (weighted median approval), a method based on ordinal ballots, to Range ballots, while making judicious use of the ratings, i.e. not merely using the ordinal information in the cardinal ratings ballots. Here’s an approval strategy rule that makes better use of the ratings and is more robust than the one I gave earlier: On each ballot B, let r be the highest number between zero and 100 such that r percent or more of the random ballot probability is held by the alternatives rated at level r or above on ballot B. Any alternative rated at this level or above is approved. An alternative is approved iff it is rated at this level r or above. Note that as r decreases from 100 to zero the total probability of the candidates rated at level r or above increases from some positive value to 100 percent. So this approval cutoff level r is somewhere between zero and 100 percent. Note also that if alternative A moves up in the ratings relative to all of the other alternatives, then alternative A’s approval does not decrease, and none of the other alternative’s approvals increase as long as the random ballot probabilities do not change. And even if A’s advancement moves A to first place on some ballot B1 so that A’s random ballot probability increases at the expense of some other alternative C, and A is rated at level r(A) on Ballot B2, then if A was approved before on ballot B2, then A will still be approved on ballot B2, because the approval cutoff r cannot more ahead of r(A) on B2, since the probability above the level of A does not increase. In fact, if C is rated ahead of A on ballot B2, the probability ahead of A decreases, otherwise it stays the same. - Original Message - From: Date: Tuesday, April 27, 2010 3:16 pm Subject: Re: A monotonic DSV method for Range To: , Cc: election-methods@lists.electorama.com, > Change the word mx to min in the second step fo the method > description so that > it reads .. > > > (2) A gets the min possible rating (say zero) if more than fifty > percent of the > top ratings belong to alternatives rated above A. > > - Original Message - > From: > Date: Tuesday, April 27, 2010 3:04 pm > Subject: A monotonic DSV method for Range > To: election-methods@lists.electorama.com, > > > Median Probability Automated Strategy Range Voting (MPASRV) > > > > It is well known that optimal Range strategy is the same as > > optimal Approval > > strategy. But this optimal strategy is hard to automate because > > (1) it depends > > sensitively on hard to estimate probabilities of winning ties, > > and (2) all > > attempts at automating strategies based on expected ratings have > > turned out to > > violate monotonicity. In fact, most DSV (Designated Strategy > > Voting) methods > > fail Monotonicity. > > > > A near optimal approval strategy which depends less sensitively > > (i.e. more > > robustly) on probability estimates than the optimal strategy > > (and based on > > ordinal information only) is to approve alternative C iff the > > winner is more > > likely to come from among the alternatives that you like less > > than C than from > > among the alternatives that you prefer over C. > > > > Unfortunately, automating this strategy by approximating the winning > > probabilities with random ballot probabilities also yields a > non- > > monotonicmethod. But it can be modified slightly to yield an > > automated strategy Range > > method that is monotonic and makes appropriate use of ratings: > > > > Modify each Range ballot so that for each alternative A ... > > > > (1) A gets the max possible rating if more than fifty percent of > > the top ratings > > (taken from all ballots and counted as in a random ballot > probability> computation) belong to alternatives rated (on this > ballot) below A. > > > > (2) A gets the max possible rating if more than fifty percent of > > the top ratings > > belong to alternatives rated above A. > > > > (3) Otherwise A's rating is not changed. > > > > Then elect the alternative with the highest average rating, > > where the average is > > taken over all the modified ballots. Settle any ties by use of > > the random > > ballot probabilities, or by random ballot itself. > > > > This method is monotonic. It satisfies Participation and IPDA > > (Independence from > > Pareto Dominated Alternatives) . It is also clone independent > > in the same sense > > that ordinary Approval is. > > > > It may seem that the method would slight candidates lacking in > > first place > > support. However, even when alterantive C has no first place > > support, if > > surrounding candidates are approved on a ballot, our process > > makes sure that C > > is approved also. > > > > To see how this works, think of a voter located in issue space. > > The further the > > options are from her, the lower her respective ratings for them. > > Her approval > > cutoff represents a "sphere" such that >
Re: [EM] A monotonic DSV method for Range
Change the word mx to min in the second step fo the method description so that it reads .. (2) A gets the min possible rating (say zero) if more than fifty percent of the top ratings belong to alternatives rated above A. - Original Message - From: Date: Tuesday, April 27, 2010 3:04 pm Subject: A monotonic DSV method for Range To: election-methods@lists.electorama.com, > Median Probability Automated Strategy Range Voting (MPASRV) > > It is well known that optimal Range strategy is the same as > optimal Approval > strategy. But this optimal strategy is hard to automate because > (1) it depends > sensitively on hard to estimate probabilities of winning ties, > and (2) all > attempts at automating strategies based on expected ratings have > turned out to > violate monotonicity. In fact, most DSV (Designated Strategy > Voting) methods > fail Monotonicity. > > A near optimal approval strategy which depends less sensitively > (i.e. more > robustly) on probability estimates than the optimal strategy > (and based on > ordinal information only) is to approve alternative C iff the > winner is more > likely to come from among the alternatives that you like less > than C than from > among the alternatives that you prefer over C. > > Unfortunately, automating this strategy by approximating the winning > probabilities with random ballot probabilities also yields a non- > monotonicmethod. But it can be modified slightly to yield an > automated strategy Range > method that is monotonic and makes appropriate use of ratings: > > Modify each Range ballot so that for each alternative A ... > > (1) A gets the max possible rating if more than fifty percent of > the top ratings > (taken from all ballots and counted as in a random ballot probability > computation) belong to alternatives rated (on this ballot) below A. > > (2) A gets the max possible rating if more than fifty percent of > the top ratings > belong to alternatives rated above A. > > (3) Otherwise A's rating is not changed. > > Then elect the alternative with the highest average rating, > where the average is > taken over all the modified ballots. Settle any ties by use of > the random > ballot probabilities, or by random ballot itself. > > This method is monotonic. It satisfies Participation and IPDA > (Independence from > Pareto Dominated Alternatives) . It is also clone independent > in the same sense > that ordinary Approval is. > > It may seem that the method would slight candidates lacking in > first place > support. However, even when alterantive C has no first place > support, if > surrounding candidates are approved on a ballot, our process > makes sure that C > is approved also. > > To see how this works, think of a voter located in issue space. > The further the > options are from her, the lower her respective ratings for them. > Her approval > cutoff represents a "sphere" such that > > (1) half of the the voters lie inside of the sphere and half > outside, and > > (2) all of the alternatives whose Dirichlet/Voronoi regions are > containedentirely inside the sphere are approved, and those > whose regions are entirely > outside the sphere are disapproved. > > (3) those alternatives that lie right on the boundary of the > sphere get rated > according to the radius of the sphere (the smaller the radius, > the higher the > rating). > > The Voronoi/Dirichlet regions are the regions of first place > support of the > respective alternatives. In the two dimensional case they are > the colored > regions found in Condorcet and Range diagrams of Yee/Bolson > type, in contrast to > the wierd shapes found in diagrams of the same type representing > IRV elections. > For Range and Condorcet the numbers of voters in the respective > colored regions > are precisely proportional to the respective random ballot > probabilities. > > Note that our new method MPASRV automatically respects top and > bottom ratings, > so voters who think they have a better strategy can control > their own approvals > and disapprovals. > > > Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] A monotonic DSV method for Range
Median Probability Automated Strategy Range Voting (MPASRV) It is well known that optimal Range strategy is the same as optimal Approval strategy. But this optimal strategy is hard to automate because (1) it depends sensitively on hard to estimate probabilities of winning ties, and (2) all attempts at automating strategies based on expected ratings have turned out to violate monotonicity. In fact, most DSV (Designated Strategy Voting) methods fail Monotonicity. A near optimal approval strategy which depends less sensitively (i.e. more robustly) on probability estimates than the optimal strategy (and based on ordinal information only) is to approve alternative C iff the winner is more likely to come from among the alternatives that you like less than C than from among the alternatives that you prefer over C. Unfortunately, automating this strategy by approximating the winning probabilities with random ballot probabilities also yields a non-monotonic method. But it can be modified slightly to yield an automated strategy Range method that is monotonic and makes appropriate use of ratings: Modify each Range ballot so that for each alternative A ... (1) A gets the max possible rating if more than fifty percent of the top ratings (taken from all ballots and counted as in a random ballot probability computation) belong to alternatives rated (on this ballot) below A. (2) A gets the max possible rating if more than fifty percent of the top ratings belong to alternatives rated above A. (3) Otherwise A's rating is not changed. Then elect the alternative with the highest average rating, where the average is taken over all the modified ballots. Settle any ties by use of the random ballot probabilities, or by random ballot itself. This method is monotonic. It satisfies Participation and IPDA (Independence from Pareto Dominated Alternatives) . It is also clone independent in the same sense that ordinary Approval is. It may seem that the method would slight candidates lacking in first place support. However, even when alterantive C has no first place support, if surrounding candidates are approved on a ballot, our process makes sure that C is approved also. To see how this works, think of a voter located in issue space. The further the options are from her, the lower her respective ratings for them. Her approval cutoff represents a "sphere" such that (1) half of the the voters lie inside of the sphere and half outside, and (2) all of the alternatives whose Dirichlet/Voronoi regions are contained entirely inside the sphere are approved, and those whose regions are entirely outside the sphere are disapproved. (3) those alternatives that lie right on the boundary of the sphere get rated according to the radius of the sphere (the smaller the radius, the higher the rating). The Voronoi/Dirichlet regions are the regions of first place support of the respective alternatives. In the two dimensional case they are the colored regions found in Condorcet and Range diagrams of Yee/Bolson type, in contrast to the wierd shapes found in diagrams of the same type representing IRV elections. For Range and Condorcet the numbers of voters in the respective colored regions are precisely proportional to the respective random ballot probabilities. Note that our new method MPASRV automatically respects top and bottom ratings, so voters who think they have a better strategy can control their own approvals and disapprovals. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
At 04:36 AM 4/27/2010, Peter Zbornik wrote: Hi, I would prefer to have the P. elected by the same people electing the board. The P. is indeed the person most often representing the party on the outside. Okay, structural defect. The president is normally the presiding officer of the board of trustees. That person should be chosen by the board itself, since they are the ones who have to live with it! This person should mostly be chosen for fairness, so that board members are treated fairly, an abusive chairperson is very damaging to an organization. You want to elect a public figure. This person should *not* be a member of the board, probably, but it's the board's job to support this person. Call it the President, fine. The person should have board rights, maybe a vote on the board, but isn't chosen as a person to control the party, but to speak for it. Important difference. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
At 10:36 PM 4/26/2010, Andrew Myers wrote:
On 7/22/64 2:59 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
Asset doesn't resemble what the Soviets had in the least There is
no "party" control, parties become unnecessary with Asset.
Abd,
The phrase "parties become unnecessary" is redolent of utopian idealism.
Redolent. Nice word. Where can I buy some redolence?
Parties will exist.
Sure. In FA/DP I call them "caucuses." The problem with present
parties is that they are too difficult to create, so FA/DP makes them
trivial to create. When they are hard to create, they develop their
own inertia, it becomes "my way or the highway." It's easy to say
that one could just found another party, "if you're so smart," but
what if one has just spent years of one's life developing a party,
and it is taken over by a faction that is highly motivated and highly
biased, maybe even corrupt?
Look, I've seen it happen with really great nonprofit organizations;
the natural oligarchy that develops substitutes its own vision for
the collective vision, the group loses connection with its roots, and
eventually it fails or becomes a far less effective "fixture" of the
political environment.
Or do you think somehow asset voting is going to prevent
concentrations of power, despite the "iron law of oligarchy" you
are fond of quoting? Or there will be concentrations of power, but
they virtuously will not engage in the give-and-take on the issues
that at least some asset voting proponents have argued is a positive feature?
Will not engage in give-and-take? Where does this idea come from?
However, note: I'm not proposing Asset Voting as a utopian solution,
but merely as a possible solution to a basic problem in democracy:
how to create a fully representative assembly. It's possible to do it
through a party system, but party systems create a serious kind of
inertia that causes them to become unrepresentative. They end up
representing party interests rather than the interests of the members.
Yes, Iron Law of Oligarchy. OLigarchies will form, but I do have
experience with organizations where this fact is harnessed rather
than becoming dominant.
In any case, FA/DP would be the utopian solution, and, strictly, it
isn't utopian, because there exists a specific plan to get from here
to there, and that plan does not require a fixed ("utopian") vision,
it only requires small improvements, each step "funding" itself and
preparing for the next steps, and, since what is being constructed is
an intelligent decision-making system, it will modify its own course
as it sees fit, and the FA aspect essentially requires and insists
that no FA is controlling, so there will be independent FAs, as
needed, and the most efficient and effective of them will survive,
and the others will be absorbed without having caused harm.
This *sounds* utopian, but only because most people don't have
experience with organizations that work like this. I did't invent the
FA concept, I simply found it and gave it a name. It works, and does
what most people routinely consider impossible.
No, of course there are and will be concentrations of power. The
Soviet system had layers of electors. This allowed voting power to
become more and more concentrated toward the top of the hierarchy
until the top levels were pure Communist apparatchiks chosen for
their unblinking loyalty to the system.
Sure. They had what appeared to be democratic mechanisms. But they
absolutely didn't have the FA concept. There was a supposedly
democratic structure, but it was *coercive.* My guess is that those
who designed the Soviet system, originally, were quite idealistic
about it, but they were doing this within a context that blamed the
defects of goverment on enemies, and they were trying to build a New
Man who would only act for collective interest.
FA/DP -- and asset voting -- work with people as they are, and they
do not incorporate any such assemptions, the opposite. Using the term
"Soviet" implies coercion. The Soviets also used a form of approval
voting. That doesn't make approval voting "soviet."
Asset Voting doesn't create, as proposed, formal layers beyond one.
(I.e, it creates, from the original Voters/Seats,
Voters/Electors/Seats). I'd be interested in seeing what the Soviets
actually had, but there are no "intermediate councils" unless the
electors themselves decide to form them, and they would not be
legally binding entities. Indeed, they might be "parties," in effect,
or political parties might create such associations. But they would
not control the voting of electors, though they certainly could
advise it. An elector doesn't have anything to lose, which is
different from elected seats, who must maintain the support of their
electors, certainly to be re-elected, but, in some systems, even to
maintain the seat, because it might be "continuous election,"
revocable. --- because of the nature of the scale problem, I've
Re: [EM] [ESF #1004] Donald Saari lecture
In responding to that, I found this: http://zesty.ca/lj/yee-oca-transferable-vote-3.pdf . It's a graphical demonstration of serious IRV nonmonoticity, written as an academic paper. (I'd seen the Yee diagrams before, but I hadn't seen it as a paper. If everyone else here has already seen that, I apologize.) JQ 2010/4/27 clay shentrup > > http://www.cochinpages.com/videos/chaotic-elections-a-mathematician-looks-at-voting/ > > > -- > Subscription settings: > http://groups.google.com/group/electionsciencefoundation/subscribe?hl=en > Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] Summable Reweighted Bucklin Voting
I suppose I wasn't clear enough about SRBV.
Here's the full procedure, with some quick justifications in parentheses.
1. Voters vote all candidates as "Preferred", "Approved", or
unvoted/disapproved. Write-ins are fine.
2. From just the preferred markings, you construct a 3D matrix where cell
x,y,z shows how many voters approved both x and y out of a total of z
approvals. That is, "Layer z" of the 3D matrix is a two-way candidate
correlation matrix (or a Condorcet matrix - it carries the same info in
different form) for the set of ballots with exactly n approvals.
(Layers 1 and 2 have full info, for the others there could be various
combinations of ballots which would lead to the same matrix. For instance,
in layer 3, with six candidates A-F, the ballots ABC, CDE, EFA, BDF give the
same matrix as BCD,DEF,FAB,ACE.)
3. If any of sum(Z|x,x,z) (that is, the approval score for candidate X) is
greater than one droop quota (call it d), elect and discount.
4. To discount layer z, first subtract d * (x,x,z) / sum(Z|x,x,Z). Then
subtract proportionally the same fraction from (x,y,z) and (y,x,z) with
x!=y. Then take the same actual amount that you subtracted from (x,y,z) and
subtract it from (y,y,z) - call that amount s(y,z). Now, for every pair m !=
n [ != x ], subtract from (m,n,z) the amount (m,n,z) * AVERAGE((m,m,z) /
s(m,z), (n,n,z) / s(n,z)).
(This is the "highest entropy" subtraction that preserves the matrix
invariants - that is, that sum((x,x)) * (z-1) = sum((x,y) for y!=x). It is
not the only subtraction that preserves these invariants - for instance, one
could have randomly picked ballots to subtract out. This also means that
SRBV is not quite identical to RBV. However, as the high-entropy solution,
the SRBV subtraction is the "most probable SRV" result over all possible
ballot combinations which give the same matrix (as you go to the limit of
infinite voters in the same proportions). I think, though I haven't yet
proven, that SRBV is proportional in all cases; certainly, I can't construct
an example where it doesn't, though I've tried. RBV itself is definitely
proportional.)
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 as long as possible.
6. If there are still empty seats, repeat step 2 (construct another matrix)
with the approvals and preferences lumped together.
7. Repeat step 4 for each candidate already elected, in order.
8. Repeat steps 3 and 4 as long as possible.
9. If there are still empty seats, repeat steps 3 and 4 until you fill them,
except just choose the highest approval in step 3 and then in step 4,
instead of discounting by a Droop quota (and thus including negative
numbers), just zero out the approval for the elected candidate.
...
If you want to avoid {or minimize} electing any candidates with less than a
Droop quota, as in step 9, you can require voters to approve at least half
of the candidates plus half of the number of seats {or a lesser minimum
number, if you just want to minimize step 9}. To make that easy, you can
include some means on the ballot to simply approve certain predeclared party
slates at once. If this rule leads to certain "undervoted" ballots, you can
still count these ballots with the undervoted approvals distributed evenly
(fractionally) among the remaining candidates - that weakens the votes, but
does not discard them entirely, and they still count fully in round 1.
This method is monotonic, proportional (I think strictly, certainly as a
strong tendency), simple to vote, and summable. In the single-winner case,
it simply reduces to two-rank Bucklin - an excellent system. Actually, you
could easily generalize the above to 3-rank SRBV, but I think that's missing
the point of Bucklin. Two ranks is just the right expressivity to make
honest voting easy and (nearly) optimal. With less (approval), you're
literally forced to strategize your cutoff; with more (3 or more rank
Bucklin), you have too many confusing and potentially strategic choices.
JQ
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 2:09 PM, Jameson Quinn wrote: > Why? The principle on which PR is based is that all seats are equal. > Actually, it could be "first seat", or "plurality winner", which is mostly > equivalent. It could also have some strategic effects, where people decide to rank their favorite of the top-2 first, so as to capture the VP position. > This would help IFF you wanted to increase decrease the > probability of a simple majority disproportionately sweeping P and VP. Since > it's only VP we're talking about, the chance of plurality-style strategy is > slim. Hmm, maybe. However, if the President resigns, the VP presumably becomes President. IMO, this means that they should both be centerists. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Apr 27, 2010, at 6:09 AM, Jameson Quinn wrote: > 2010/4/27 Raph Frank > On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 7:19 AM, Jameson Quinn > wrote: > > Why not: > > - ranked votes > > - STV for council. Keep track of which members are elected first and second, > > one of them will be VP. > > - Condorcet winner among the councilmembers is P. (You could use original > > ballots or have the council revote.) > > - VP is first councilmember, or, if that person is P, second councilmember. > > The order of election with PR-STV shouldn't be used to determine VP, > all seats are equal. > > Why? > > Actually, it could be "first seat", or "plurality winner", which is mostly > equivalent. This would help IFF you wanted to increase decrease the > probability of a simple majority disproportionately sweeping P and VP. Since > it's only VP we're talking about, the chance of plurality-style strategy is > slim. The problem with FPTP in this case is that it's largely accidental. In the obvious counterexample, a significant majority of voter splits their vote across several clones, causing their representatives to be elected late, even though they have the most support. One way to order the winners in an STV election is to count for the the original board, and then re-count for successively smaller groups, but with only the most recent winners eligible, giving a complete ordering of the board. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] Fwd: Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
-- Forwarded message -- From: Raph Frank Date: Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 2:51 PM Subject: Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections To: Peter Zbornik On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 9:18 AM, Peter Zbornik wrote: > thanks for your information and the short explanation on STV. > I was thinking about d'Hondt's method in general. D'Hondt is equivalent to the Jefferson Method. It is clearer why that is proportional. 1) pick an initial divisor 2) divide each party's vote total by the divisor 3) For each party round down to the nearest whole number of seats 4) If the total number of seats is correct, then finish 5) Otherwise, update to a better divisor and repeat (go to 2) Lots of divisors will give the correct number of seats, but they always give the same number of seats per party. So, you take each party's vote total, divide it by a number and then round downward. This means that the method is proportional, except for rounding errors. The divisor will work out to be around (votes cast)/(seats). Sainte-Lague rounds to the nearest whole number rather than rounding downwards. This is why Sainte Lague is fairer (though there can be strategy issues for smaller parties). Anyway, the process for d'Hondt is equivalent to: The initial divisor is set equal to the number of votes received by the largest party. When you divide all the other parties' totals by this value, they all give a fraction less than one, so none of the other parties receive any seats. The largest party gets 1 seat. This is the same as d'Hondt. When updating the divisor, we reduce it by just enough so that 1 additional seat is assigned. If party has N seats and V votes, then the divisor must drop below divisor = V/(N+1) before it will get the next seat. So, according to the update rule, we reduce the divisor so that at most one more party gets a seat. Therefore, we need to find the party who gets its next seat at the highest possible divisor. So, we pick the party with the highest V/(N+1) and we set the divisor so that they get 1 more seat. So, we set the divisor to slightly below the above number. This means that the party who has the highest V/(N+1) gets the next seat in each step. However, this is exactly what d'Hondt does. It just doesn't calculate the divisors at each step. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
2010/4/27 Raph Frank > On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 7:19 AM, Jameson Quinn > wrote: > > Why not: > > - ranked votes > > - STV for council. Keep track of which members are elected first and > second, > > one of them will be VP. > > - Condorcet winner among the councilmembers is P. (You could use original > > ballots or have the council revote.) > > - VP is first councilmember, or, if that person is P, second > councilmember. > > The order of election with PR-STV shouldn't be used to determine VP, > all seats are equal. > Why? Actually, it could be "first seat", or "plurality winner", which is mostly equivalent. This would help IFF you wanted to increase decrease the probability of a simple majority disproportionately sweeping P and VP. Since it's only VP we're talking about, the chance of plurality-style strategy is slim. JQ Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 7:19 AM, Jameson Quinn wrote: > Why not: > - ranked votes > - STV for council. Keep track of which members are elected first and second, > one of them will be VP. > - Condorcet winner among the councilmembers is P. (You could use original > ballots or have the council revote.) > - VP is first councilmember, or, if that person is P, second councilmember. The order of election with PR-STV shouldn't be used to determine VP, all seats are equal. However, I think your idea to run condorcet after the PR-STV election is a good idea. I would change it to: - ranked ballots - PR-STV elects the council - Excluding non-elected candidates -- Condorcet winner is President -- Condorcet runner-up is Vice President Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 1:54 AM, Juho wrote: > A fully separate P election would make the board less proportional - unless > the elected P would have voting power only if he/she is already a member of > the board. I think if there are a reasonable number of members, then the non-proportionality will only be slight. I think both the President and VP should be centerists. The President should definitely be a centerist, so making the VP a non-centerist gives that faction more power. Also, by having 2 centerists on the council, you get a mix of councilors who represent portions of the party and councilors who represent the entire party. I would suggest Each voter casts a ranked ballot 1) The condorcet winner becomes President 2) The runner-up becomes Vice-President 3) Use PR-STV to elect the remainder of the council This is simple and doesn't does require special rules to protect from elimination. The same ballots are just processed three times. Also, the fact that the ballots are used three time should help with strategy protection. For by-elections, another option is to elect the condorcet winner. However, ballots held by any of the other are not included. This means that if you have 5 PR-STV seats, the ballots will be split into 6 piles A) Ballots held by councilor A B) Ballots held by councilor B C) Ballots held by councilor C D) Ballots held by councilor D E) Ballots held by councilor E F) Ballots held by none of the candidates If councilor C decides to resign, then you work out the condorcet winner based on the ballots in pile C and F. Also, if the President resigns, the VP becomes President. Vacancies in the VP office are filled by the condorcet winner based on all the ballots. A Councilor must resign his seat to become President or VP, so that triggers another vacancy that has to be filled. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Hi, I would prefer to have the P. elected by the same people electing the board. The P. is indeed the person most often representing the party on the outside. Peter On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 4:02 AM, Jonathan Lundell wrote: > On Apr 26, 2010, at 5:54 PM, Juho wrote: > > > On Apr 27, 2010, at 3:22 AM, Jonathan Lundell wrote: > > > >> On Apr 26, 2010, at 5:18 PM, Juho wrote: > >> > >>> On Apr 27, 2010, at 3:01 AM, Jonathan Lundell wrote: > >>> > On Apr 26, 2010, at 4:45 PM, Juho wrote: > > > Draft of a method: > > > > - collect ranked votes > > - use Condorcet to determine P (Condorcet tends to elect a compromise > candidate that all voters find reasonably good) > > - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect the group of P and VPs > (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P will > not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) > > - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect members of the board > (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P and VPs > will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) > > > > One could elect P and VPs also later. In that case one could elect > them from the members of the (already existing) board. Otherwise the process > would be similar. > > This is a better approach, I think. Protecting already-elected members > and preserving proportionality is a subtle problem, and I don't think > there's a completely satisfactory solution available. It's defensible for > filling vacancies (below), but when it can be avoided, it should be. (Unless > someone has a great idea for this kind of countback.) > > A burial strategy for P would have unfortunate effects for the STV > election, is a possible problem. > >>> > >>> The STV election that follows may also reduce the incentives to try the > burial strategy. That is because (in addition to burial not being a very > efficient strategy in the first place) the benefit would be only to get a > better P but not more voting power in the board, and because the modified > vote could well contribute to the benefit of the competing sections in the > proportional election. > >> > >> It's a reasonable argument (though the STV election should go first), if > the voters are reasonable and if they regard the P office as less important > than the makeup of the board--that depends on how the office is defined, I > suppose. > >> > >> Another alternative would be to hold a separate P election (new ballots) > once the board is defined. Or to let the board elect the officers from > amongst themselves. That appeals to me, actually, again depending on the > definition of the roles. > > > > A fully separate P election would make the board less proportional - > unless the elected P would have voting power only if he/she is already a > member of the board. > > That wasn't my suggestion. Rather, one would hold an STV board election, > and then elect P from the proportionally elected board. Depending on the > role of P, the voters for P would be the at-large membership or the board > itself (the latter makes sense if P/VP is largely an internal role, as > opposed to an external independent executive). > > 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] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Juho, the requirements are correct, except that several elections is not a big problem. Thus I do not require, that "board, P and VP elections will take place at the same time (=> one can use the same ballots in all these elections)", it would be nice to have, though. I have to study your proposal and the discussion a little bit more. Peter On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 1:45 AM, Juho wrote: > I think there are good and well tested single-winner and proportional > multi-winner methods that the Czech Green party could use (like Condorcet > methods and STV). For the election of president (P) and vice-presidents (VP) > there maybe are no good existing solutions (see requirements below), so we > may need to propose a new one (hopefully just a combination of old well > tested tested methods). Here's one proposal for your consideration. > > > Based on the discussion my understanding of the requirements is as follows > (please correct if wrong). > > - P and VP are regular members of the elected board (or council) > - it would be a good idea to elect a centrist P (one that appeals to all, > not just to the biggest grouping) > - VPs should be elected in a proportional style (the strongest group shall > not be able to take all the P and VP seats) > - the board (including P and VPs) should be proportional > - the board election should be based on voting individuals (not named > sections of the party or their nominated representatives) > - board, P and VP elections will take place at the same time (=> one can > use the same ballots in all these elections) > - the method must be easy to understand and also well tested where possible > > > Draft of a method: > > - collect ranked votes > - use Condorcet to determine P (Condorcet tends to elect a compromise > candidate that all voters find reasonably good) > - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect the group of P and VPs (some > special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P will not be > eliminated in the process but will be elected) > - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect members of the board (some > special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P and VPs will > not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) > > One could elect P and VPs also later. In that case one could elect them > from the members of the (already existing) board. Otherwise the process > would be similar. > > If one needs to elect new members to the board to replace old ones one > could use the old ballots + special rules that will not eliminate any of the > sitting board members. > > Does this work? Is this practical? Can this be considered to be > understandable and well tested? Are there some strategic opportunities? Does > this maintain proportionality as it should? Any conflicts with the > expectations and needs of the Czech Green party? > > 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
