Re: [EM] [CES #9085] Survey of high-view youtube voting system videos
For what it's worth, I found the CGPGrey videos a long time ago, they were my introduction to all of this, and I found them extremely accessible, and quote liked them. I wish he would do more on the various systems I have come to learn about since then. -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 -Original Message- From: electionscie...@googlegroups.com [mailto:electionscie...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Warren D Smith Sent: Tuesday, July 9, 2013 5:47 PM To: Maxime Lévesque; electionscience Subject: [CES #9085] Survey of high-view youtube voting system videos youtube search, voting systems. You can tell their search gizmo to sort by rating, #views, relevance, etc. By rating is totally useless since it says a video rated + by 1 rater, with zero other raters, is top rated. #views is more useful. Here I examine all the ones with at least 50K viewers (there were 15 such). Sorting these 15 into order of decreasing rating (approve/disapprove ratio), and throwing out the ones I determined to be off topic, here is what I found: --- UCSB Security Group's Attack on Voting Machines (Part1 of 2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWDEZqqqBHE 79+, 0- maximum possible rating since zero disapprovals. Decent video quality, mediocre audio. Long, somewhat annoying. Many helped produce this. It makes its point for those who listen all 9 minutes. Mixed-Member Proportional Representation Explained by CGPGrey http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT0I-sdoSXU 113 good video+audio. Seems made using keynote. I dislike it since artificially hard to follow, the animals theme annoying, video effects abused, too fast. The Problems with First Past the Post Voting Explained by CGPGrey http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo 98 I dislike it since artificially hard to follow, the animals theme annoying, video effects abused, too fast. Made with keynote. But I find it better than the otherCGPGrey voting videos. 6.5 minutes. The Alternative Vote Explained by CGPGrey http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE 96 I dislike it since artificially hard to follow, the animals theme annoying, video effects abused, too fast. Made with keynote. Cleese on PR (full length) Posted by fairvote, probably illegally. Made by professional comic John Cleese. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSUKMa1cYHk 64 guy talking with charts on easels, computer graphics, and props, professional editing, writing and camera work. Occasional humor. America's Roommates Launch 'One Vote Doesn't Matter' Campaign by The Onion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF5ZeXOCZBY 61 entertaining but useless. Lots of fancy graphics and many contributors. Voter Apathy The Arena / Tales Of Mere Existence by AgentXPQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtJ9SBh0RC4 56 Lousy video quality and mediocre audio with voiceover, but I like it due to the content and good writing editing. Turns out it was professional video for radiofrance. Actually this is probably the one I like best. Just How Corrupt Will The United States Voting System Be In 2012? by Danny Wilten http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVS5TIppad8 52 really bad video quality. mediocre audio quality. Voice over with still pictures and stolen video clips. Unappealing to me. Most of the still pictures contain text which is hard to read. Lousy obviously unscripted writing and unpolished narration and not easy to tell quickly what he is aiming to say. He has some good stuff to say. Voting Booth Talk Back by collegehumor http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUn1mhvK9Lg 41 crappy writing and animation, but good video+audio quality, many voices by actors. Zero content, apparently. Sucks shit. Voting machine (Bush vs. Kerry) by lamyunholic http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUdpj3gJofQ 34 entertaining but wholy stupid and content free. Many helpers in making this video. India's EVMs are Vulnerable to Fraud by Prasad et al. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlCOj1dElDY 34 voice over with keynote animated slideslow. Good quality video audio. Slow and not very entertaining, but makes its point pretty damn convincingly. Is your Cat confused about the alternative vote? by midnightcrow http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiHuiDD_oTk 28 good story telling keeps it entertaining, but is not easy to learn well from it. Lots of video editing. Seems to avoid lies. Stephen Fry on how the Alternative Vote works http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J31QkzWmmUc 25 lots of lies told. I detest this video. Abuses a lot of fancy graphics and good audio. Alternative Vote System : What it is why you need to vote on May 5th for AV by teasup2you http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FstA45lxgFs 12.7 excellent audio video quality. Animations seem beyond what can easily be done using keynote. Probably used higher quality animation software. Tells a lot of lies, but sounds good while doing so. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups The Center for Election Science group. To unsubscribe from this group and
[EM] Discourse
Did my arrival somehow bring less civility and/or tolerance, or was this always a rough-and-tumble place before I even got here? I would hate to think that I brought the level of conversation down, politeness-wise. -Benn Grant -Original Message- From: electionscie...@googlegroups.com [mailto:electionscie...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Abd ul-Rahman Lomax Sent: Monday, July 1, 2013 2:23 PM To: electionscie...@googlegroups.com; electionscie...@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: [CES #9014] Re: EMAV? At 11:46 PM 6/30/2013, Clay Shentrup wrote: I heard there was this much simpler and more intuitive method of extremely high quality, called Score Voting. Check it out. I've learned not to expect much depth from Clay. EMAV uses a score ballot and is based on score principles, with one difference: it tests for majority approval, which is the one fly in the score ointment, at least with regard to score methods that do not collect approval information. (Runoff Score might.) If there are multiple majorities, it uses score. If there is no majority approval, it uses score. It's a hybrid approval/score method. The only objection I've seen to it so far complained about chicken dilemma, a complaint that would apply to score. Voting strategy would indicate voting a sincere score ballot, with the three constraints: 1. vote the favorite at top rating. 2. vote the least preferred at bottom rating. 3. consider the election expectation as the middle rating, and rate all candidates who meet or exceed the election expectation at the middle rating or higher. With the ranks, it satisfies the desire of voters to exert significant voting power while still expressing a first preference. So Clay is just expressing a knee-jerk preference for score, as he has done for years. Let us know, Clay, when you are ready to have a real conversation. Otherwise, keep up your good work. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups The Center for Election Science group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to electionscience+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Discourse
Thanks for everyone's candor and feedback. I can certainly appreciate how annoying it is to deal with someone like myself that 1) is often asking questions that everyone else had heard many times before and knows the answer by heart, and 2) someone who may not be able to understand the explanations when they are given. I am running into #2 a lot, so much that I am wondering if this list is really mostly for people who are already trained, steeped, and comfortable with concepts like utlity and Batesian regret, with high level math and set theory, and so on. It may simply require more time and effort than I have to give to understand the answers to these questions, I certainly do not have the option presently to take courses in these advanced subjects. I was hoping there would be a more down-to-earth way to get this stuff, but whether there's no way to dumb this stuff down, or whether it's just not something that people here are interested in, either way I can appreciate it. Finally, while I was surprised that erudition didn't eliminate the churlishness, my best approach to that fact is probably to get a thicker skin. I'm not promising to be a punching bag, mind you, but I can probably be a little less sensitive and just assume that these groups are more pugnacious than I had imagined. Thanks everyone. I'm going to keep my subscription to these groups for now (if I may), and I will try to be mindful of all of the above if and when I continue interacting with them. -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] Before Voting Methods and Criteria: Outcome Design Goals (long)
I've been coming at understanding better the options and choices, merits and flaws of various approaches to holding votes - mostly with the kind (and sometimes not-so-kind) help of the people on this list. However, a (I assume) basic thought occurred to me, which may be so obvious no one need ever discuss it, but I want to double check my thinking on some of this. The rest of this post will NOT be concerned with any one particular voting method or criteria. Instead I will be comparing different scenarios of voter preference with thoughts about who should win. If I am not making sense quite yet, come along and hopefully it will make more sense in practice. If not, you can ask me questions or delete the post. Let's assume that we have a magical gift - a super power, if you will. We can know exactly what each voter thinks about each candidate. Now, because this comes from magic, it cannot unfortunately be used as a part of the election process, but it will be useful for our examination of attitudes of the voters. So as we turn our power on a random voter, we can pick (on a scale of 0 to 100) how they feel about each candidate. A 0, in this case, indicates that the voter is absolutely against the candidate winning the election, and will vote however he must to stop that from happening, whereas a 100 indicates the reverse: that the voter is absolutely for this candidate's victory, and will give it everything he can at the ballot box. 50 indicates a sort of meh reaction - doesn't hate them, doesn't love them - or possibly the voter has some aspects of the candidate he really likes, but some other aspects that he is less than thrilled with. So, using this power, we can know absolutely on a scale of 0 to 100 what each voter thinks of each candidate. Using that knowledge, we ought to be able to say who should win - which I will return to in just a moment. First, each candidate's support by the voters can be noted on a graph, with the X axis denoting the scale of 0-100 Favorability, and the Y axis denoting the percentage of voters who hold that exact opinion. So, for example, on a graph like this, you might find that 12% rate a certain candidate at 0F - they *hate* this guy. Another 14% may rate this candidate at 100F - these are his loyal base. Most people fall somewhere in between. To keep things simple, I'm going to talk about candidates as if their voters clump at certain points, instead of spreading more fuzzily. I think the core questions become no less valid and no less worth thought. I am going to posit a series of two candidate comparisons, and ask who should win. The point here is to ignore the methods for a bit, and just see what our gut says, given the absolutely magically accurate information we have about the voter's preferences. To start with, let's imagine one candidate with 51% of the voters giving him an 80F, and 49% giving him a 0F. Another candidate has a 63% of the voters giving an 80F (with the remaining 37% giving 0F.) Which candidate ought to win? Unless I miss something, this one is an easy one. Both candidates have the same level of favorability but one has greater breadth than the other. It seems self-evident to say that when the favorability is identical, but the breadth is not, greater breadth should win. Likewise, if instead our election has one fellow with 51% @ 80F and another at 51% @ 100F, the second ought to win, since he has the same breadth, but higher favorability, right? (Note, if I say that a candidate has 51% @ 80F, not only does that mean 51% of the voters find him at an 80 Favorability, but that all other voters omitted (the 49%) find him at 0F. Additionally please note that these are NOT elections or election methods, just questions about who we feel should win given different circumstances of voter sentiment.) So, when one candidate has equal or better breadth and/or favorability, it makes sense to our sense of fairness that they ought to win. Now let's examine the more complex and fun situation of unequal aspects - with one candidate with a better breadth, but his competitor with a better favorability. This time, we have a candidate named Wilson who manages to get 51% @ 100F. His competitor Franklin gets 80% @ 90F. In this circumstance, I think a lot of us would prefer that Franklin win. Sure, 51% of the voters like Wilson better than Franklin, but at least 29% of them (and possibly more) still like Franklin almost as much - and only 20% of the voters don't like Franklin. Franklin is, I think, the ideal example of a compromise candidate - he not the first choice of the majority, but he is well chosen by a broad swath. Now let's change that up. Let's say that it's four years later, and people's opinions have changed. Wilson still gets 51% @ 100F, but now Franklin gets 80% @ 52F. The bloom is off Franklin's rose. At this point, Franklin is looking less like a comprise candidate that everyone
[EM] Two notes and a possibly interesting method from a friend
Hi, first a quick note: I haven't been commenting because real life stuff, work, etc has been keeping me busy, but I fully intend to go back and answer any posts sent to me via the list(s). If just that my time and focus comes in bursts and droughts. ;) Second note, I continue to thank all who are being helpful to me in the journey. Now, I asked my friend, who hasn't read up on election stuff to come up with a good method - I was wondering what someone intelligent would come up with, with no prior exposure to election science. Note: the thought experiment I asked of him had many basic constraints, for example, the requirement that a voter be able to go and vote on a single day within ten minutes, and that there would be ten candidates, among others. This is the method he suggested: * Present the people with the ballot of 10 candidates and ask them to pick their top three and their bottom three. * Every time a candidate is picked in a person's top three, the candidate gets a +1. Every time a candidate is picked in a person's bottom three, the candidate gets a -2. The four candidates the person did not pick for either get +0. (Sidebar: For N number of candidates, you have MOD(N/3) positives, MOD(N/3) negatives, and the rest are left neutral.) * At the end of the night, we add up the scores and the candidate with the highest score wins--even if the score is negative. It's very interesting, and I in my newness to this all don't immediately the warts, but since every method has them, I assume this one does too? What do you guys think of this? -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 2:53 AM, Juho Laatu juho.la...@gmail.com wrote: On 24.6.2013, at 16.06, Benjamin Grant wrote: So, as far as *I* can see, this converts Score Voting into Approval voting. The only people who would bother to vote sincerely are: 1) Those who truly prefer Gore highest and Bush lowest (or vice versa), because there’s no strategic downside. You seem to assume that voters with opinion 'Gore:75, Nader: 90, Bush: 10’ are not strategic when they vote 'Gore:75, Nader: 100, Bush: 0’. There are thus two possible levels of sincereness, either people who think that all candidates are about equally good should vote that way, or if they should exaggerate and tell that the worst one of them is worth 0 points and the best one is worth 100 points. But in the instance where someone's highest priority is to stop Bush, and a distant second level priority is to see Nader elected over Gore, it seems unavoidable to admit that if they vote 'Gore:75, Nader: 100, Bush: 0’ they will be harming their first priority by withholding support from Gore. Isn't this correct? So then that is a non-strategic vote in comparison to 100/whatever/0, yes? That's what makes strategic voting different from sincere voting, isn't it: that strategic voting has a greater chance of creating a more preferred outcome? So long as the strategic vote and the sincere vote are not the same, a sincere vote is a vote against your preferences. That is why it seems so important to me to favor system where those two kinds of voting coincide as often as possible, right? It’s days like these that I feel that there *is* no way to elect people that is fair and right. L All methods have some problems. But the problems are not always so bad that they would invalidate the method. I'd propose to study also the Condorcet compliant methods. I note that they already popped up in the later discussions and you more or less already promised to study them. When compared to Range style utility measuring style Condorcet methods take another approach by allowing majorities to decide. With sincere (Range) preferences 55: A=100 B=90, 45: B=100 A=0 majority based methods allow A to win. Althoug B has clearly higher sum of utiliy, it is also a fact that if one would elect B, B would be opposed by 55% majority. A would be supported by 55% majority. Not a pretty sight to watch, but that's how majority oriented systems are suposed to work. Maybe the majority philosophy is that you will get a ruler that can rule (and there is no mutiny), instead of getting a ruler whose proposals would be voted against every time by 55% majority in the parliament or in public elections. Juho Interesting observation. Personally, in the above example, my gut tells me that B ought to win. However, start tweaking B's numbers downwards, and at some point we will find a level in which A actually looks better that B, for example: 55: A=100 B=40 45: B=50 A=0 Now B isn't looking so good compared to A. So there is obviously some threshold - which may be different for each of us - at which A is the better choice. Perhaps score voting (when everyone *does* vote sincerely) captures that threshold - maybe B ought to win when his numbers are highest. Problem is, a lot of people - perhaps even most - will soon get wise how to push their preferences, and suddenly the Ballots start to look a lot like this: 55: A=100 B=0 45: B=100 A=0 And then we are back where we started. -Benn Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 3:00 AM, Juho Laatu juho.la...@gmail.com wrote: On 25.6.2013, at 1.06, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: Remember that criterion compliances are absolute. So a method may fail a criterion yet be perfectly acceptable in real elections. I just want to support this viewpoint. It is not essential how many criteria a mehod violates. It is more important how bad those violations are, i.e. if the method likely have serious problems or not. The best method might well be a method that violates multiple criteria, but manages to spread the (unavoidable) problems evenly so that all of them stay insignificant. Hmmm. I think I would like to be more cautious. I think there are different levels of worries: - Having a criterion fail often in practice is worse than having it fail more rarely in practice. - Having a criterion fail rarely in practice is worse than having it fail more hypothetically (than actually). - Having a criterion fail hypothetically is worse than not having it fail at all Now there are some criteria that aren't important to me at all, that I do not value what the try to protect - and those I factor out. But in general, I am going to try to be very aware of the nature and prevalence of the unpleasant results that violating criteria can bring. In other words, until a particular system's violation of a criteria is clearly demonstrated to me to be insignificant, I shall instead adopt a worst case approach. ;) -Benn Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 5:44 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm
km_el...@lavabit.com wrote:
On 06/25/2013 12:53 AM, Benjamin Grant wrote:
The thing is, whenever we have more than two parties running, I think we
will always have weaker spoiler parties that cannot really win, but
that can, if the system allows or encourages people to vote against
their best interest, cause people to get a much lower ranked choice,
possibly their least preferred choice - this is my whole concern.
But here's a thing also to note. Nader voters are never worse off by
voting [Nader: 100, Gore: 100, Bush: 0] than by voting [Nader: 0, Gore:
100, Bush: 0]. Because of this, a simple Approval strategy goes: Vote for
the frontrunner if you prefer him to the second-place candidate. Then vote
for everybody you like more than the candidate you approved in the first
step.
OK, I cannot argue with that. Once Abe has given his full support to Gore
(to stop Bush), it doesn't harm his desire to stop Bush to also score Nader
at 100. That is simply true.
However, while it doesn't help Bush, I would argue that it won't help Nader
defeat Gore either - I mean, the whole reason this Nader supported is top
scoring Gore in the first place is because it is well known that Gore has a
much better chance (perhaps the only chance) at beating Bush. In such a
situation, giving both Gore and Nader the same number of votes is not going
to change the fact that Gore is stronger than Nader. So it seems irrelevant
whether or not he votes for Nader in this circumstance.
Aha! But what if what is likely happens in stage two: People get ahead
of themselves and give their full support to Nader and less support to
Gore *before* Nader is strong enough to beat Bush? Then Bush wins, both
the Nader and Gore voters freak out, and now Nader people go back to
voting Gore with full support, because now they've been burned!
The only way to avoid this, I *think*, is with a system in which
expressing a preference of A over B doesn't let C win - and such a
system may well have worse flaws, possibly.
Yep. That's a very definite risk, and one of the reasons I don't think
Approval is a good method in a vacuum. I'd support Approval as a
compromise more because it gives a lot of benefit for a very small tweak to
Plurality, than that it is good in itself: a value/cost consideration
rather than a raw value consideration.
But you're right, the problem there is very real (unless somehow the
voters only think of candidates as people I can accept and people I
definitely don't want to see in office). And the burn, as you put it,
could not just harm Nader, but it could harm Approval itself -- just like
I've argued that the weird way IRV acts can backfire.
The thing is, I think I agree with most everybody on the list in that I
think Plurality voting is the absolute *worst*. My worry is functionally
and in practice, Approval won't ultimately fix what is broken in Plurality
- joke third parties and/or the spoiler effect.
Well, to be fair, just about anything is better than plurality. However,
what I meant is that functionally Approval (when each voter acts to
their best (or least bad) outcome) seems not that different from
Plurality Voting. We still top vote the front runner that has the best
chance to defeat our abhorred candidate. If we have a candidate we
prefer more than the palatable front runner, we can top vote him too,
but that won't help Nader beat Gore. It seems irreconcilable in this
context.
In Approval, you can choose between helping Nader beat Gore, or helping
{Nader, Gore} beat Bush. In Plurality, you can choose between helping Nader
beat Gore or helping Gore beat Bush. The whole dynamic of the readjustment
in stage 2 depends on the voters being able to tell others, through the
poll results, that they prefer *both* Nader and Gore to Bush.
As such, Approval is better than Plurality. If the tricky part between
stages two and three go off well, then Nader wins. In contrast, in
Plurality, there's no way to get to stage two itself because signaling that
you like Nader carries such a high cost of potentially making Bush win.
Again, I can't claim that it's not different - I just feel like for all
practical purposes, despite the options, you wind up getting the same
results in practice. Sure we can get more information out of an election,
and that may not be bad. If after all the votes are in, the average scores
are Gore:5.6 Nader 1.3 and Bush 4.7, that's more information for the people
to receive about how people voted than if the plurality vote was Gore: 51%
Nader: 6% and Bush: 43% - or worse yet (to Abe), Gore:43% Nader: 6% and
Bush: 51%.
So I guess Approval, even in worst case strategic situations has a few
plusses:
- People who can't not vote for Nader can still help stop Bush by also
voting for Gore.
- People who need to stop Bush and were going to vote Gore no matter
what can now also vote Nader. It is very
Re: [EM] [CES #8955] Re: Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 7:01 AM, George Sanders geovot...@gmail.com wrote: A general reply for Ben: Ben, If 'strategic voters' devolve Score into Approval into Plurality, that's their choice, but at least those who WANT greater choice can have it in Score. AND, every young person already knows about 'Score Voting'--because it's what we all use on the internet to rate our favorite products and services...and to SELECT the best one for our specific use if we want--SO WHY NOT USE THIS MAGNIFICENT TOOL IN SELECTING THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSONS IN THE ENTIRE FREE WORLD?! What people want isn't always what the need. I think I would support a system that produced better results in terms of other factors (such as less susceptible to strategic voting) than worry about someone wanting something if it seems not to be in their own best interests. For example, I wrote a role playing game (Dream Factory) that had a mechanic that player could use - 90% of the time it was not their best option, but occasionally it was. What I found was that players were using the option a lot more than they should, much more in situations where the mechanic harmed more than it helped. So in the 2nd edition, I removed that mechanic. I see no need to give people choices that they think will get them what they want, but actually won't. And make no mistake, I am not saying that people shouldn't be allowed to pursue their preferential outcome, I am saying that they shouldn't be given a system that results in them more often not getting the outcomes that they actually want. In other words, I don't care if they don't get the system they want, so long as the system they get is better at given them the *outcomes* they want, make sense? And Ben, what voting method would you use in this scenario (I've posted this before, but it deserves re-mentioning here): *Scenario*: Three candidates: two polarizing demagogues and a well-liked moderate centrist. The two polarizing demagogues garner all the [first-place] votes (think something like Stalin vs. Hitler here) and one of them wins the majority, while the 3rd candidate--who was thought of as *everyone’s close 2nd choice* (think a John-Huntsman-type here)--got NO VOTES (although he had 100% ‘approval’)!!! *Question for you to answer*: “ Who amongst the three candidates do you think is the best choice for the collective society, and what voting methods will select him? Like I commented on similarly in another post, I think a compromise candidate that everyone (truly) supports ought to win over a candidate that 51% support strongly. (Although I am not sure that Huntsman is that candidate, but that's besides the point.) As to what voting system would select him, I made a very on point announcement earlier: when I point out the flaws of a system in these emails, even when I say I hate certain pieces of it, is no guarantee that I won't hate the aspects of other systems even more. In other words, Just because I see some warts on Score/Approval voting doesn't mean that I have ruled it out, as I find it quite plausible that each other system has some pretty horrible pieces too. Right now, my goal is not to choose a system, it's to make sure I understand the flaws in this one, Score/Approval Voting. :) -Benn Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [CES #8957] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
I am surprised to see a lesser of evils argument rejected by someone on a list about election methods, all of which seem to have significant downsides. I guess I find it ironic that someone thinking about merits and flaws of one voting system over another isn't more comfortable with the lesser of evils approach. I wasn't trying to start an argument, my point on this subject is ultimately a dry and I think a non-controversial one. If there are choices (such as an election) in which there are several unequal results, it is in our best interests to choose the option that best answers our needs and preferences. In my experience, people who reject voting for the lesser of evils do so not because they have any reason to think that such a choice yields a better future, but because either 1) it is a non rational outburst caused by being deeply unhappy at not having better options or, 2) the failure to see that all choices aren't identical. I cannot do much about #1, but for any that are in camp #2 (and I think that a lot of (but not all) people who *think* they are in camp #2 are really in camp #1), any group of candidates, even if bought and paid for by the same corporate interests, *are* going to prioritize their actions differently. Even candidates that are 90% the same have a 10% difference that, on the world stage, makes a HUGE difference. Or to put another way, the supreme court would be VERY different in a Democrat hadn't won the last two elections. Make sense? We don't have to like our options, but it is in our best interest to choose the best one among them, even if that simply means the least awful. I am not saying this is a happy fact, just a pragmatic one. Either way, it is simply true. -Benn On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 12:22 PM, Stephen Unger un...@cs.columbia.eduwrote: I guess that means that I am either unintelligent or a conservative. I'll choose the latter, altho many who call themselves conservative (except, perhaps Libertarians, who I am in accord with on the crucial issues of civil liberties and militarism) might disagree when they hear my views on various matters. For example, I don't think it is conservative to support the kind of police state that is now virtually established here, with the Bill of Rights being systematically shredded. Nor do I think it is conservative to allow our environment to be trashed, to allow marketing of inadequately tested pharmaceuticals, or to send drones to murder people all over the world. I don't think the above (abbreviated) list describes what one would normally think of as progressives either. Regarding election politics, my view is that Obama and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership does not represent what liberals call the lesser evil, but rather what Bruce Dixon of the Black Agenda Report has characterized as the more effective evil. It is obvious that, with the slick con man Obama in the White House, opposition by liberals to policies at least as bad as those of the awful Republicans under Bush is virtually nil. E.g., polls indicate that most Democrats now support government email snooping, which they opposed when Bush was president. (Most Republicans supported this under Bush and now oppose it.) See http://www.people-press.org/** 2013/06/10/majority-views-nsa-**phone-tracking-as-acceptable-** anti-terror-tactic/http://www.people-press.org/2013/06/10/majority-views-nsa-phone-tracking-as-acceptable-anti-terror-tactic/ If we had approval voting, I would definitely NOT approve Rs and Ds, would approve the Greens and, depending on some details, would probably approve the Libertarians. (I did not vote for Clinton, Gore, Kerry, or Obama, and would not have approved any of them if that option had been available. I believe that the lesser evil concept has been a major factor in bringing us to the point where all the elements of a fascist state are now in place, and it is just a question of time before they are scaled up to make it obvious to all. So far I don't see any significant opposition, particularly from young people. Steve Stephen H. Unger Professor Emeritus Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Columbia University On Mon, 24 Jun 2013, Benjamin Grant wrote: “Most non-conservative are intelligent enough to see that Gore and Bush are equally bad from their point of view.” was supposed to be “Most non-conservative are intelligent enough to see that Gore and Bush are NOT equally bad from their point of view.” My typing sucks and always has. You lucky bastards get to try to read what I write. ;) -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 From: electionscience@googlegroups.**comelectionscie...@googlegroups.com [mailto:electionscience@**googlegroups.comelectionscie...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Benjamin Grant Sent: Monday, June 24, 2013 11:40 AM To: electionsciencefoundation Cc: EM Subject: Re: [CES
Re: [EM] [CES #8967] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
Stephen doesn't realize that unless one speaks with reason and dispassion, others may not even bother to read what one has written. Stephen doesn't realize that speaking about someone in the third person in front of them is a major dick move - or is *trying* to be a dick. Stephen is actually acting like the only goal he has is defending a fragile ego, acting out of fear out of concern for his alpha male status - not truth. Stephen is being passive aggressive. You know how I know this? Because everything Stephen said could have been said just the same either directly to me or without even mentioning my name at all. Nice work, Stephen. When you want to rejoin the adult table, hopefully I will have as well. ;) Until then, 2 notes: 1) if you want rational discussion with me, you have to dig yourself out of your hole before I will take it seriously. 2) if you just keeping acting like a jerk to me, I have no problem calling you on it. So, got it out of your system now? -Benn Grant -Original Message- From: electionscie...@googlegroups.com [mailto:electionscie...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Stephen Unger Sent: Tuesday, June 25, 2013 5:46 PM To: electionsciencefoundation Cc: EM Subject: Re: [CES #8967] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality? Benn doesn't seem to be able to distinguish between supporting candidates who might be acceptable to varying degrees, and rejecting unacceptable candidates, who may vary among themselves to varying degrees. I differ with Libertarians on some substantial issues, but also agree with them on major issues that, at this time, are of critical importance. Especially because I am not worried that they would destroy what remains of our democracy, I would probably vote to approve their candidates, or give them relatively high scores. Of course the Ds and Rs are not identical. Their rhetoric is certainly very different, and there are some relatively less important issues on which they differ. I do find it very sad that there are still decent, intelligent people who, after over 5 years of Obama, have still not recognized the damage he is doing to our country. While Bush was fairly straightforward in stating his positions he was not able to institutionalize the damage he did. There was audible, if not very effective, opposition to Bush. But when Obama put Wall Streeters in charge of our economy and government finances, refuses to do anything about climate change, is chiseling away at social security, etc., those who protested when Bush did such things lost their voices. E.g., the Patriot Act, once considered an outrageous intrusion on liberty, is now accepted by the bipartisan establishment, and liberals are silent. People like Benn apparently still don't get it. I suggest that my outburst and unhappiness is very rationally based, while Benn is closing his eyes to what is going on. Re the Supreme Court, I am not impressed with Obama's choices, or those of other recent Democrats. In addition to putting some very bad justices on the court (sometimes with substantial support from Democrats) Republican presidents appointed Souter, Stevens, and Blackmun, probably the three best justices appointed over the past several decades. Benn also does not seem to recognize that an election is important, not only in terms of who wins, but also in how strong a showing other candidates make. Here is where approval and score voting are potentially very valuable. They make it possible for new parties and candidates to build strength to the point where they can win elections. I.e., lesser evil fans can vote for BOTH the LE and one or more decent candidates. I also believe that there is too much emphasis being given to combatting strategic voting. With the exception of lesser eviling, which, I suppose, could be considered in this category, this is not such a big problem, and certainly should not be used as an excuse for supporting voting systems that prevent voters from expressing their views maximally, or which have terrible pathologies. Steve Stephen H. Unger Professor Emeritus Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Columbia University On Tue, 25 Jun 2013, Benjamin Grant wrote: I am surprised to see a lesser of evils argument rejected by someone on a list about election methods, all of which seem to have significant downsides. I guess I find it ironic that someone thinking about merits and flaws of one voting system over another isn't more comfortable with the lesser of evils approach. I wasn't trying to start an argument, my point on this subject is ultimately a dry and I think a non-controversial one. If there are choices (such as an election) in which there are several unequal results, it is in our best interests to choose the option that best answers our needs and preferences. In my experience, people who reject voting for the lesser of evils do so not because they have any
Re: [EM] [CES #8970] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
OK, I will totally eat this one if that's true, if there was no hostile intent. But it sincerely appears to me that there IS hostile intent, and passive aggressiveness. * Benn doesn't seem to be able to distinguish * People like Benn apparently still don't get it. * Benn also does not seem to recognize If I am wrong, then I unreservedly apologize to all. But it's hard for me to see this as utterly benign, as opposed to sneakily hostile. Maybe I am totally off base here - maybe being impugned in the third person in front of oneself is completely socially acceptable. It just doesn't seem like a nice intent to me. -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 From: electionscie...@googlegroups.com [mailto:electionscie...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Jameson Quinn Sent: Tuesday, June 25, 2013 6:46 PM To: Benjamin Grant Cc: electionscie...@googlegroups.com; EM Subject: Re: [EM] [CES #8970] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality? Benn, Warren did cross a line with you, and you were entirely justified in calling him on it. But on a list like this, with half a dozen people actively participating in each thread, it is really hard to decide whether to address people in the second or third person. I understand that after the incident with Warren you are naturally a little bit touchy, but I think that Stephen was arguing in good faith, and you should try address his arguments' logic and not their language. My humble opinion-ly y'rs, Jameson -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups The Center for Election Science group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to electionscience+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com mailto:electionscience+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
Hi guys, I'm still here, still pondering, but now I have another question. I've been thinking about score voting, approval voting, and plurality (FPTP) voting, and I have a concern. Say we have a situation where we have three candidates, say Gore, Nader, and Bush. Say we have a voter, Abe whose greatest concern is that Bush NOT win. His second priority is that Nader win over Gore - but this priority is a distant second. He *really* doesn't want Bush to win. He would prefer Nader over Gore, but he *hates* Bush. Let's also say that Abe is intelligent, and he is committed to using his vote to maximize his happiness - in other words, rather than vote sincerely and cause his preferences harm, he will always vote strategically where it is to his benefit to do so. If Score Voting was in place, and he were to vote sincerely, Abe probably would vote something like 'Gore:75, Nader: 100, Bush: 0'. However, he's no fool, and he knows that while it is theoretically possibly that Nader *might* win, Gore is his best chance to stopping Bush, and that withholding score from Gore might (if all Nader supporters did it) result in Gore not getting enough of a score, therefor Bush could win. So strategically speaking, Abe reasons that although he supports a less likely candidate more, he strategically should score the front-runner Gore at full strength, so long as keeping Bush out is the greatest need - and so long as Nader's win is unlikely. So, as far as *I* can see, this converts Score Voting into Approval voting. The only people who would bother to vote sincerely are: 1) Those who truly prefer Gore highest and Bush lowest (or vice versa), because there's no strategic downside. 2) People who would rather feel more sincere about their vote than feel good about the outcome of their vote. 3) People who aren't intelligent to realize that by voting sincerely they may be helping elect their least preferred candidate. And say what you want about intelligence being a bar to entry, you can bet that the smart people behind ALL candidates will make sure that everyone gets the message, so we can largely ignore #3. Most people I imagine would be pragmatic enough to worry more about the end result and less about sincere vs. strategic, so we ignore #2. And #1 people are going to vote the same way anways, so they may as well use Approval voting. OK, so let's throw out Score Voting and use Approval voting. Gore v Nader V Bush. Abe (who hates Bush but prefers Nader) gives an approval vote to Nader, his top-most preference, but knowing that withholding approval from Gore could elect Bush (and not wanting to play the spoiler) he also gives an approval vote to Gore. Since Gore in this example is far and away receiving much more support than Nader, Gore now beats Bush. Let's call the party that put Nader on the ballot the Green party, and that they continue to field candidates in further elections that use the Approval voting system. Abe notices the following pattern: when the Green party fields a candidate that doesn't even have a glimmer of hope winning the election (like the Gore/Nader/Bush one) that people that support the Green party candidate also approve the Democrat candidate as a bulwark against the Republican. And since in those elections the Green party never really had a hope of winning, the Green approval vote is ultimately irrelevant - those elections would have proceeded no differently than if the Green supporters had simply voted Democrat. But much worse yet, Abe notices that in *some* election, the Green party actually gets a chunk of people thinking that Green could actually win. And emboldened by their hopes, many Green supporters decide to go for it, approve of the Green candidate, but *not* the Democrat one. Result: in elections where more voters think more favorably towards Green's chances, their least preferred choice (the Republican) tends to win more! This are my two thoughts: a) Intelligent use of Score Voting becomes Approval Voting, and the harm in unwise use of Score voting means that Approval Voting is superior to (and simpler than) Score voting pragmatically. b) Approval Voting tends to result in irrelevant approval votes being given to weak candidates - which is pointless, or slightly stronger (but still losing) candidates can once again present a spoiler effect where a person's least preferred choice is elected because they cast their approval only toward their most preferred choice, who was nowhere near supported enough to stop their least preferred choice. Am I substantially wrong about any of this? Ultimately, in real and practical terms, it seems that done intelligently, Score Voting devolves into Approval Voting, and Approval Voting devolves into Plurality Voting. How is this not so? If it *is* so, then as much as I abhor Plurality Voting, I must now likewise abhor Score and Approval Voting. But that shoves me back at
[EM] Question about the Plurality Criterion
As I have had it explained to me, the Plurality Criterion is: If there are two candidates X and Y so that X has more first place votes than Y has any place votes, then Y shouldn't win. Which I think means that if X has, for example, 100 votes, then B would have to appear on less than 100 ballots and still *win* for this criterion to be failed, yes? I cannot imagine a (halfway desirable) voting system that would fail the Plurality Criterion - can anyone tell me the simplest one that would? Apart from a lame one like least votes win, I mean? -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Is it professional?
I am not sure who is ignoring your upgrade, but I am curious - can you remind me how your voting system works again? -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 From: election-methods-boun...@lists.electorama.com [mailto:election-methods-boun...@lists.electorama.com] On Behalf Of David L Wetzell Sent: Monday, June 24, 2013 11:09 AM To: EM Subject: [EM] Is it professional? To ignore the simple upgrade to IRV that I have proffered and defended at length on this list-serve, when you argue against IRV? dlw Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [CES #8922] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 11:08 AM, Stephen Unger un...@cs.columbia.eduwrote: Regarding the plurality criterion: The Plurality Criterion is: If there are two candidates X and Y so that X has more first place votes than Y has any place votes, then Y shouldn't win. It is NOT worthy of respect. Consider the following 2-candidate SV election. #votes C1 C2 51 9 8 49 0 9 C1 should win according to the Plurality Criterion, but obviously C2 is the people's choice. One of the advantages of SV is that it properly handles cases like this. Steve OK, SV=Score Voting, right? Score voting doesn't have places, does it, as it is not a ranked based system? I agree with you that in the above election C2 should win, of course - although some would not. I dunno, maybe I don't under this, or maybe the Plurality is better defined without referring to first place or any place. I guess that's my next question: is the Plurality relevant to non ranked systems? Is the Criterion used by experts (like you guys) to refer to C2 winning about as failing the Plurality Criterion? Or is it only about things like Bucklin and IRV? -Thanks. -Benn Grant Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Fwd: Is it professional?
So if I understand you: You have a single election. You permit people to rank up to 3 candidates, no more. You eliminate form consideration all but the top 3 people who were ranked, regardless of what rank they got. Then, with only those three left, you proceed to process them with standard IRV to find the winner. Is that a correct summation of you system, do I understand it right? On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 11:19 AM, David L Wetzell wetze...@gmail.comwrote: To: Benjamin Grant b...@4efix.com Most IRV in real world limits the rankings to 3 candidates per voter. In my approach, I treat the rankings as approval votes in the first round and tally up the number of times each candidate gets ranked to determine 3 finalists.There are 10 ways to rank 3 finalists so I sort the votes into these 10 categories, tally them up and use the info to have an instant runoff vote among the 3 finalists. Ben, this is the approach that I said gave the same result for all of the cases you brought up in your initial email to the list, which illustrated why you thought IRV was flawed. dlw 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] [CES #8922] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 11:08 AM, Stephen Unger un...@cs.columbia.eduwrote: One point overlooked here is that any new party has to go thru an incubation period during which it has virtually no chance of winning. Voting for such a party helps strengthen it, and makes it more likely that others will support it next time around. At some point it may become a contender, and then it might actually start winning elections. If you cast votes (approve or give high scores to) only for parties that might win the current election, then we will be stuck forever with the existing 2-party scam. It doesn't seem like you are saying I am wrong about that, you just seem unhappy that I am right? And under Score/Approval/Plurality voting systems, there would be three phases a party might go through: A) unpopular enough not to be a spoiler B) popular enough to be a spoiler, but not popular enough to win C) popular enough to win often (25% of the time, for example.) On your way to C, you are going to have a LOT of B, and you may never make it to C, especially if people get burned voting for the emerging party by getting their least preferred candidate. The only way to build a strong new party in reality, as far as I can see, is to have a voting system that does not penalize you into getting your least favored choice by voting for your most favored one. Voters may have many different philosophies, and the voting system should accommodate as many as possible. I don't know that I agree with either side of this. Voters ultimately, by and large and by definition, I think, want the best outcome possible. If Nader isn't a real possibility, then a non-conservation wants Gore FAR ahead of Bush. Most non-conservative are intelligent enough to see that Gore and Bush are equally bad from their point of view. And most would rate the election of Bush far more a likely than the election of Nader, and even if it was a coind toss among all three (Gore/Nader/Bush) most would rightly view stopping Bush as more critical than helping Nader beat Gore. It is easily possible that, in the same SV election, voters A and B both score 3 candidates, C1, C2, C3, as 9, 0, 0, respectively for different reasons. A might consider C2 and C3 both to be terrible, while B might consider C2 to be perhaps a 4 or 5, but chooses 0 because of concern that C2 might defeat C1. A third voter with views similar to C2's might score the candidates as 9, 5, 0. All are perfectly legitimate actions. Since we cannot distinguish between pairs such as A and B, it is not appropriate to try to alter the voting system so as to prevent voters from acting strategically. (I think it would be a good idea to urge voters to cast SV votes that accurately correspond to their appraisals, and candidates might do well to so advise their supporters.) Again, is it *theoretically possible that Nader voters might prefer Bush to Gore, but in the real world, progressive tend to see democrats as far superior to republicans, and libertarians tend to see republicans as far superior to democrats. Ignoring that seems like a bad idea. Efforts to change the voting system to nullify or prevent strategic voting lead to systems that restrict the voter's options. E.g, median-based score voting, in effect, restricts the extent to which a voter can support a candidate. First of all, is efforts to ... nullify or prevent strategic voting the same meaning as efforts to make sincere voting produce similar choices to strategic voting.? Second of all, it seems to me that the less divergence there is between strategic and sincere voting, the more beneficial qualities the voting system has, such as: -we can worry less about the spoiler effect, which promotes more than just 2 parties -we can worry less that people are accidentally voting against their interests -we can have fewer debates about whether people have an obligation to vote strategically or sincerely This would seem to be a good thing. But ultimately, I don't think you answered my central questions (and pardon me if you did and I just don't see it): - Intelligent use of Score Voting becomes Approval Voting, and the harm in unwise use of Score voting means that Approval Voting is superior to (and simpler than) Score voting pragmatically. - Approval Voting tends to result in irrelevant approval votes being given to weak candidates – which is pointless, or slightly stronger (but still losing) candidates can once again present a spoiler effect where a person’s least preferred choice is elected because they cast their approval only toward their most preferred choice, who was nowhere near supported enough to stop their least preferred choice. Am I substantially wrong about any of this? Ultimately, in real and practical terms, it seems that done intelligently, Score Voting devolves into Approval Voting, and Approval Voting devolves into Plurality Voting. Thanks.
Re: [EM] [CES #8924] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
Most non-conservative are intelligent enough to see that Gore and Bush are equally bad from their point of view. was supposed to be Most non-conservative are intelligent enough to see that Gore and Bush are NOT equally bad from their point of view. My typing sucks and always has. You lucky bastards get to try to read what I write. ;) -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 From: electionscie...@googlegroups.com [mailto:electionscie...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Benjamin Grant Sent: Monday, June 24, 2013 11:40 AM To: electionsciencefoundation Cc: EM Subject: Re: [CES #8924] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality? On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 11:08 AM, Stephen Unger un...@cs.columbia.edu mailto:un...@cs.columbia.edu wrote: One point overlooked here is that any new party has to go thru an incubation period during which it has virtually no chance of winning. Voting for such a party helps strengthen it, and makes it more likely that others will support it next time around. At some point it may become a contender, and then it might actually start winning elections. If you cast votes (approve or give high scores to) only for parties that might win the current election, then we will be stuck forever with the existing 2-party scam. It doesn't seem like you are saying I am wrong about that, you just seem unhappy that I am right? And under Score/Approval/Plurality voting systems, there would be three phases a party might go through: A) unpopular enough not to be a spoiler B) popular enough to be a spoiler, but not popular enough to win C) popular enough to win often (25% of the time, for example.) On your way to C, you are going to have a LOT of B, and you may never make it to C, especially if people get burned voting for the emerging party by getting their least preferred candidate. The only way to build a strong new party in reality, as far as I can see, is to have a voting system that does not penalize you into getting your least favored choice by voting for your most favored one. Voters may have many different philosophies, and the voting system should accommodate as many as possible. I don't know that I agree with either side of this. Voters ultimately, by and large and by definition, I think, want the best outcome possible. If Nader isn't a real possibility, then a non-conservation wants Gore FAR ahead of Bush. Most non-conservative are intelligent enough to see that Gore and Bush are equally bad from their point of view. And most would rate the election of Bush far more a likely than the election of Nader, and even if it was a coind toss among all three (Gore/Nader/Bush) most would rightly view stopping Bush as more critical than helping Nader beat Gore. It is easily possible that, in the same SV election, voters A and B both score 3 candidates, C1, C2, C3, as 9, 0, 0, respectively for different reasons. A might consider C2 and C3 both to be terrible, while B might consider C2 to be perhaps a 4 or 5, but chooses 0 because of concern that C2 might defeat C1. A third voter with views similar to C2's might score the candidates as 9, 5, 0. All are perfectly legitimate actions. Since we cannot distinguish between pairs such as A and B, it is not appropriate to try to alter the voting system so as to prevent voters from acting strategically. (I think it would be a good idea to urge voters to cast SV votes that accurately correspond to their appraisals, and candidates might do well to so advise their supporters.) Again, is it *theoretically possible that Nader voters might prefer Bush to Gore, but in the real world, progressive tend to see democrats as far superior to republicans, and libertarians tend to see republicans as far superior to democrats. Ignoring that seems like a bad idea. Efforts to change the voting system to nullify or prevent strategic voting lead to systems that restrict the voter's options. E.g, median-based score voting, in effect, restricts the extent to which a voter can support a candidate. First of all, is efforts to ... nullify or prevent strategic voting the same meaning as efforts to make sincere voting produce similar choices to strategic voting.? Second of all, it seems to me that the less divergence there is between strategic and sincere voting, the more beneficial qualities the voting system has, such as: -we can worry less about the spoiler effect, which promotes more than just 2 parties -we can worry less that people are accidentally voting against their interests -we can have fewer debates about whether people have an obligation to vote strategically or sincerely This would seem to be a good thing. But ultimately, I don't think you answered my central questions (and pardon me if you did and I just don't see it): * Intelligent use of Score Voting becomes Approval Voting
Re: [EM] Fwd: Is it professional?
Isn't that what I said? If not, where did I get it wrong? -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 From: election-methods-boun...@lists.electorama.com [mailto:election-methods-boun...@lists.electorama.com] On Behalf Of David L Wetzell Sent: Monday, June 24, 2013 12:20 PM To: Benjamin Grant Cc: EM Subject: Re: [EM] Fwd: Is it professional? I limit the collection of ranking info to up to 3 rankings per voter, which is useful for practical purposes, and then treat the up to 3 rankings per voter as approval votes to determine which three of the umpteen candidates proceed. I then process those three with the standard IRV to find the winner. dlw dlw On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 10:24 AM, Benjamin Grant panjakr...@gmail.com mailto:panjakr...@gmail.com wrote: So if I understand you: You have a single election. You permit people to rank up to 3 candidates, no more. You eliminate form consideration all but the top 3 people who were ranked, regardless of what rank they got. Then, with only those three left, you proceed to process them with standard IRV to find the winner. Is that a correct summation of you system, do I understand it right? On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 11:19 AM, David L Wetzell wetze...@gmail.com mailto:wetze...@gmail.com wrote: To: Benjamin Grant b...@4efix.com mailto:b...@4efix.com Most IRV in real world limits the rankings to 3 candidates per voter. In my approach, I treat the rankings as approval votes in the first round and tally up the number of times each candidate gets ranked to determine 3 finalists.There are 10 ways to rank 3 finalists so I sort the votes into these 10 categories, tally them up and use the info to have an instant runoff vote among the 3 finalists. Ben, this is the approach that I said gave the same result for all of the cases you brought up in your initial email to the list, which illustrated why you thought IRV was flawed. dlw 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] Fwd: Is it professional?
Let me try again, because I want to make sure I get what you are trying to communicate. 1) People vote from the pool of all candidate, for their top 3, ranked. For example, Candidate 1: 1st place, Candidate 2, 3rd place, C3, no place, C4, no place, C5, 2nd place, and the rest of the cnadidates, no place. 2) Each candidate who got ANY rank place (of the three) gets a +1 point per ballot they got ranked on. We know throw out all but the candidates with the top three point scores. 3) Now, we use the ballots to conduct an IRV style algorithm with the three remaining candidates and determine the winner. If I *now* got that right, it seems to me that if there are, for example, ten candidates, and if I choose three and NONE of the three I chose make it to the final three, then my ballot is irrelevant in choosing which of the final 3 I preferred. Therefor there would be a STRONG strategic reason to make SURE that at least one of the three I rank would be favored to make it to the final IRV round - which diverges from the possible sincere vote. -Benn Grant. On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 12:31 PM, David L Wetzell wetze...@gmail.comwrote: Ben: You eliminate form consideration all but the top 3 people who were ranked, regardless of what rank they got. dlw: This was unclear about how the top 3 were chosen. dlw On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 11:27 AM, Benjamin Grant b...@4efix.com wrote: Isn’t that what I said? If not, where did I get it wrong? ** ** -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 ** ** *From:* election-methods-boun...@lists.electorama.com [mailto: election-methods-boun...@lists.electorama.com] *On Behalf Of *David L Wetzell *Sent:* Monday, June 24, 2013 12:20 PM *To:* Benjamin Grant *Cc:* EM *Subject:* Re: [EM] Fwd: Is it professional? ** ** I limit the collection of ranking info to up to 3 rankings per voter, which is useful for practical purposes, and then treat the up to 3 rankings per voter as approval votes to determine which three of the umpteen candidates proceed. I then process those three with the standard IRV to find the winner. ** ** dlw dlw ** ** On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 10:24 AM, Benjamin Grant panjakr...@gmail.com wrote: So if I understand you: ** ** You have a single election. You permit people to rank up to 3 candidates, no more. You eliminate form consideration all but the top 3 people who were ranked, regardless of what rank they got. Then, with only those three left, you proceed to process them with standard IRV to find the winner.** ** ** ** Is that a correct summation of you system, do I understand it right? ** ** On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 11:19 AM, David L Wetzell wetze...@gmail.com wrote: To: Benjamin Grant b...@4efix.com ** ** Most IRV in real world limits the rankings to 3 candidates per voter. In my approach, I treat the rankings as approval votes in the first round and tally up the number of times each candidate gets ranked to determine 3 finalists.There are 10 ways to rank 3 finalists so I sort the votes into these 10 categories, tally them up and use the info to have an instant runoff vote among the 3 finalists. Ben, this is the approach that I said gave the same result for all of the cases you brought up in your initial email to the list, which illustrated why you thought IRV was flawed. dlw ** ** ** ** 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] [CES #8922] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 12:28 PM, Kevin Venzke step...@yahoo.fr wrote: But you can change the scenario so that Plurality would be failed: 51: C1 rated 5, C2 unrated 49: C2 rated 10, C1 unrated Kevin A little confused again. What voting system are we using above? Lost track of that. -Benn Grant Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [CES #8922] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 12:50 PM, Kevin Venzke step...@yahoo.fr wrote: But you can change the scenario so that Plurality would be failed: 51: C1 rated 5, C2 unrated 49: C2 rated 10, C1 unrated Kevin A little confused again. What voting system are we using above? Lost track of that. My assumption was that we were talking about Range, with blank ratings counting as zero. Kevin If we are talking about Range and counting blank rating as zero, then this: 51: C1 rated 5, C2 unrated 49: C2 rated 10, C1 unrated is really no different than this: 51: C1 rated 5, C2 rated 0 49: C2 rated 10, C1 rated 0 And I think, since plurality says If there are two candidates X and Y so that X has more first place votes than Y has any place votes, then Y shouldn't win, then X and Y have the same number of any place votes, i.e., Range voting can NEVER fail plurality. Again, I can't imagine a decent system that would. Now if there was some functional difference between a 0 rating and no rating at all, we could examine that, I think. For example, I have hear some people talking about averages, what if a lack of rating *was* functionally different from a 0 rating? What if the score each candidate gets isn't the *sum* of all their ratings (with unratings = 0) but the average of all their ratings, with a non-rating not counting against them? Let me work this through here. According to the sum approach, C1 gets 5 * 51 = 255 and C2 gets 10 * 49 = 490, C2 wins. If we are looking for the average, then C! obviously has an average of 5 among the 51 people who gave him a rating, while C2 obviously has an average of 10. C2 wins. It's interesting to note that whether or not you use sum or average both of the first example above turn out the same way. In any case, with a Range/Score system that permits people to have a functionally different from zero no rating option, I still have an issue concluding the the Plurality criterion was failed. Did C1 have more first place votes than C2? I don't think so. Therefor Plurality is not violated, is it? Because in order for Plurality to be violated, the one candidate would have to get more first place votes that another has ANY place votes, and still lose. As far as I can see here, C2 had more first place votes that C1. Is there a way to get C1 to win while C2 has more first place votes than C1 has ANY place votes? I cannot imagine that in this circumstance. Can you? What am I missing? Or have I screwed up somewhere? -Benn Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 1:28 PM, Kathy Dopp kathy.d...@gmail.com wrote: Please forward to the appropriate list for me. Thank you. From: electionscie...@googlegroups.com [mailto:electionscie...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Benjamin Grant Sent: Monday, June 24, 2013 11:40 AM On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 11:08 AM, Stephen Unger un...@cs.columbia.edu mailto:un...@cs.columbia.edu wrote: If you cast votes (approve or give high scores to) only for parties that might win the current election, then we will be stuck forever with the existing 2-party scam. Yes. But the point of approval or score voting is voters do not have to do that in order to keep their least favorite from winning. I understand that is it's goal, but I seem to have pointed out that it still does that. Aparently, not well, though. And under Score/Approval/Plurality voting systems, there would be three phases a party might go through: A) unpopular enough not to be a spoiler B) popular enough to be a spoiler, but not popular enough to win C) popular enough to win often (25% of the time, for example.) Those options apply to plurality and IRV, not to approval or score voting where a voter's 2nd choice vote cannot cause his least favorite to win. Except when it does? I know that the party line is that Approval and Score Voting cannot cause your least favorite to winner, but that's untrue if Nader being Abe's (our voter's) preference over Gore causes him to give less than 100 to Gore - that *can* cause Bush to win. The only way to be sure that he has done everything to prevent Bush from winning (if that is his highest priority in a Nader/Gore/Bush election) is to make sure to score the person most likely to beat Bush as high as possible. Therefore he *must* strategically score Gore a 100, Therefore Score/Range voting devolves into Approval voting. So let's examine Approval voting, since that is what we are left with. If we do an Approval voting system with Gore/Nader/Bush, assuming that Abe's first priority is to stop Bush and his next priority (a distant second, considering how opposed he is to Bush) is to support Nader over Gore. Well, now he cannot do that. He can support Nader *and* Gore, be he cannot support Nader *over* Gore without risking a greater chance of a Bush victory. And in our example (as in real life) Gore has much more support than Nader. This means that If he Approval votes for BOTH of them, it is unlikely that his vote for Nader will accomplish anything. If he votes for ONLY Nader, he has a better chance for Nader to beat Gore, but a much worse chance for stopping a Bush victory. And, this is the poison pill: Let's say that election after election people see that more and more people are voting for Nader,although he is not winning. Thinking optimistically (as some people like to) that this might be the year that Nader could take it all, they put all their money on Nader - they vote Nader, but *not* Gore. The result? Gore's numbers drop, Nader's numbers rise a little, but Bush still get's the most! This seems almost worse than plurality, in a way, because at least with plurality we all knew and admitted that we need to vote against the spoiler effect, but Approval voting may actually suffer from it just as much while not as obviously - meaning people may vote against there interests more by not seeing that. Make sense? On your way to C, you are going to have a LOT of B, and you may never make it to C, especially if people get burned voting for the emerging party by getting their least preferred candidate. Speaking re. plurality or IRV still. Huh? The only way to build a strong new party in reality, as far as I can see, is to have a voting system that does not penalize you into getting your least favored choice by voting for your most favored one. Yes. Agreed. Good. Second of all, it seems to me that the less divergence there is between strategic and sincere voting, the more beneficial qualities the voting system has, such as: -we can worry less about the spoiler effect, which promotes more than just 2 parties -we can worry less that people are accidentally voting against their interests -we can have fewer debates about whether people have an obligation to vote strategically or sincerely This would seem to be a good thing. Ideally, but practically we may have to continue to vote for all candidates other than our least favorates. Again, huh? we may have to continue to vote for all candidates other than our least favorates? When we we NOT vote for candidates other than our least favorites? You seem to be suggesting that I want voters to vote for their least favorite candidates? * Intelligent use of Score Voting becomes Approval Voting, and the harm in unwise use of Score voting means that Approval Voting is superior to (and simpler than) Score voting pragmatically. I agree. OK, so at least we agree that Score Voting
Re: [EM] Question about the Plurality Criterion
Thanks for the note - squirreling this away for future study. :) -Benn On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 1:38 PM, Chris Benham cbenha...@yahoo.com.auwrote: Ben, MinMax(Margins) fails the Plurality criterion. It elects the candidate with the weakest pairwise loss as measured by the difference between the two candidates' vote tallies. An alternative definition is that it elects the candidate who needs the fewest number of extra bullet-votes to be able to pairwise-beat all the other candidates. 3:A 5:BA 6:C CB 6-5, BA 5-3, AC 8-6. That method elects B, but the Plurality criterion says that B can't win because of C. Given that if the B voters had truncated the winner would have been C, this is also a failure of the Later-no-Help criterion. The method meets the Condorcet criterion and Mono-add-Top. It has been promoted here by Juho Laatu. Chris Benham Ben grant wrote (24 June 2013): As I have had it explained to me, the Plurality Criterion is: If there are two candidates X and Y so that X has more first place votes than Y has any place votes, then Y shouldn't win. Which I think means that if X has, for example, 100 votes, then B would have to appear on less than 100 ballots and still *win* for this criterion to be failed, yes? I cannot imagine a (halfway desirable) voting system that would fail the Plurality Criterion - can anyone tell me the simplest one that would? Apart from a lame one like least votes win, I mean? 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] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 3:06 PM, Kathy Dopp kathy.d...@gmail.com wrote: Bejamin, I think we fundamentally agree about most things except for one statement you made (I think you're seeing some disagreement where there is none), which is why I'll only respond to this. You said Since this isn't fixed, tell me what the benefit of Approval is in the real world over Plurality? I want to be CLEAR about this, so please let me: I am not asking how the what supporters of Approval voting promise will happen, nor what Approval voting's creators intentions are - I am ONLY asking about pragmatic and real-world RESULTS. Me: E.g. If people see that the number of votes for Nader are virtually equal to those for Gore, and investigation (undistorted polling) shows that 9 out of ten of those voters preferred Nader first, and the least favorite candidate was more than 10% behind, then in the next election mathematically, only 5% of those voters have to switch to Nader for Nader to win and still beat the least favorite. Yes, that is the best case scenario, and what we all hope would happen. What if the scenario I described happened instead? It's actually virtually guaranteed on the *way* to gettting to the scenario you painted. I.e. People are influenced by perceived public opinion and as well since your scenario was counterfactual, it may be less likely than cases that are possible where approval voting ends up making it possible for small parties to grow large and beat currently large parties. You have no basis for claiming your counterfactual is more likely to occur than any other and yet you want to cut off clear opportunity for building support for smaller parties based on it? People, or at least some people may be able to figure out how and when to use approval voting to boost currently smaller parties. I have yet to see any demonstration of any counterfactuality, so at this point I am not granting that claim. Unless I just plain don't understand what you mean when you say counterfactual - which is quite possible. In any case, among the things I seek in a voting system is a system where one doesn't have to choose between stopping your least preferred candidate and supporting your most preferred one. And so far as I can see, that will happen realistically in Approval voting when a minority group gets too optimistic. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Question about the Plurality Criterion
On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 4:45 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm km_el...@lavabit.com wrote: On 06/24/2013 04:10 PM, Benjamin Grant wrote: As I have had it explained to me, the Plurality Criterion is: If there are two candidates X and Y so that X has more first place votes than Y has any place votes, then Y shouldn't win. Which I think means that if X has, for example, 100 votes, then B would have to appear on less than 100 ballots and still **win** for this criterion to be failed, yes? I cannot imagine a (halfway desirable) voting system that would fail the Plurality Criterion – can anyone tell me the simplest one that would? Apart from a lame one like “least votes win”, I mean? That depends on what you put into a candidate not being ranked on the ballot. If you think that voters mean that all the candidates they rank are better than those they don't rank, then Plurality obviously makes sense. On the other hand, if not ranking a candidate simply means the voter has no opinion, then the Plurality criterion is no longer as obvious. Yeah, I am starting to get that - that is a critical choice to make in crafting and executing the system. A very simple system that fails the Plurality criterion for this reason is mean (average) Range. In this system, you take the mean rating of each candidate, and greatest mean wins; but in this particular variant, if you don't rate candidate X, you don't change his mean in any way. So you could have a candidate A that's ranked with a mean of 8.5 by 1 million voters, and a candidate B that's ranked with a mean of 9 by 500 000 voters (and otherwise not ranked). Say more than 500k of the ballots list A first. Then B is barred from winning by the Plurality criterion. Yet by the logic of mean Range, B should win because, according to that logic, the voters who didn't list B were just saying they didn't *know* what rating B should have and instead left the task of determining B's mean to the others who did rate B. Now, pure mean Range has a problem in that candidates who are only known by a few fanatics could get an illegitimate win, so some sort of soft quorum (like IMDB does for its movies) is probably better. I just use mean Range as an example of a system that isn't obviously insane yet fails the Plurality criterion (or one particular way the Plurality criterion might be extended to rated ballots). Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info Interesting - to wrap my brain around this going to have to create some exmaple fake elections with these stats, will reply back once I have, could be a day or more. -Benn Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] All systems of voting are probably deeply flawed
Just a quick note to all, if I seem to be going after or down on whatever system of voting you prefer, don't take it personally. It's not that I have a better one in mind, it's just that I have a drive to truly know each system top to bottom, no holds barred. And just because I find an aspect of a system is abhorrent is not to say that I won't find another system even more abhorrent. It seems that every voting system I have check out thus far has what I would certainly call deep flaws. Even if I remove some of the Criteria from the list that I don't much care about - for example, if I understand it correctly, it doesn't bother me if a well-supported compromise candidate (ranked as 1 or 2 by 90%) is elected over a more narrowly supported first place candidate that still got 51% of the vote. But even if I remove from my personal consideration all the criteria that I don't care about, there are plenty left that I do, and it sure is seeming that no matter what, even the least bad system is going to have some (to me) serious flaws. So, again, if I am saying that your favorite voting system is horrible, that doesn't mean I'm saying that it isn't inevitable. Just that none of our choices seem that wonderful. After all, sometimes the lesser of evils is the best one can do - at least as a pragmatist, I must be open to that. :) Thanks. -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Is it professional?
On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 6:19 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm km_el...@lavabit.com wrote: Scenario 1: Voters don't rank now, but will rank when they see it's worth it. Here IRV will eventually crash but BTR-IRV is, well, better. Scenario 2: Voters rank, contrary to your assumptions (but suggested by international evidence). Again, BTR-IRV does better. Scenario 3: Voters don't rank and never will. BTR-IRV is here no worse than IRV. Under what scenario does BTR-IRV *lose* against ordinary IRV? I am quite interested in the answer to this as well, as I imagine that whatever the answer is is a defining advantage, should any exist. -Benn Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 6:06 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm km_el...@lavabit.com wrote: On 06/24/2013 03:06 PM, Benjamin Grant wrote: So strategically speaking, Abe reasons that although he supports a less likely candidate more, he strategically should score the front-runner Gore at full strength, so long as keeping Bush out is the greatest need – and so long as Nader’s win is unlikely. So, as far as *I* can see, this converts Score Voting into Approval voting. You're generally right. There are some very particular situations with incomplete information where it makes the most sense to use partial ballots, but those happen way too rarely to make a difference. Excellent, that makes me feel like I am not utterly in left field wondering where everyone went. You can see this from the other end, too: say you're in an Approval election and want to vote 0-10-range style. You want to give X a rating of 4, but it's an Approval election. To do this, you generate a random number on 0...10. If it is lower or equal to the rating (in this case 4), you approve of X, otherwise, you don't. If everybody did that, the Range and Approval results would give the same winner (with high probability). So in a real sense, Range is Approval with fractional votes permitted. Also, Range could possibly give different results than Approval voting. Consider an election where 99% of the voters are strategic. The vote comes out to a tie between Nader and Gore, according to these 99%. Then the remaining 1%, voting sincerely, vote something like [Nader: 90%, Gore: 70%, Bush: 10%] (strategic would be [Nader: 100%, Gore: 100%, Bush: 0%]). Then those votes break the tie and Nader wins. For reasons like this, a mix of strategic and honest voters give better results than just having strategic ones. Of course, there are (in the circumstance where Gore is the better chance to beat Bush than Nader) likely more Gore:100 Nader:0 Bush) votes than Nader: 90 Gore:70 Bush 10 ones. In fact, given that we *are* talking about an election with two strong front running candidates and one spoiler weaker one, isn't it *far* more likely that Gore is far in front of Nader and the only real unknown is if Gore will beat Bush or not? Which leads right back to the entire scenario of issues I began with. The thing is, whenever we have more than two parties running, I think we will always have weaker spoiler parties that cannot really win, but that can, if the system allows or encourages people to vote against their best interest, cause people to get a much lower ranked choice, possibly their least preferred choice - this is my whole concern. Am I substantially wrong about any of this? Ultimately, in real and practical terms, it seems that done intelligently, Score Voting devolves into Approval Voting, and Approval Voting devolves into Plurality Voting. How is this not so? I would much prefer a good ranked balloting system to Approval, but let me try to explain the other side as well. Your observation is right in that there's obvious tension between approving of only Nader (so Nader will win) and of both Nader and Gore (so Bush won't win). This is one of the reasons I dont like Approval all that much: I think it burdens the voter with having to convert an internal preference into an Approval-style ballot in what I call manual DSV. DSV is Designated Strategy Voting, a meta-system where one has a computer find out the optimal strategic vote for some given honest vote. The implication of having to engage in manual DSV is rather like having to do a mathematical task in your head before voting: we'd rather not and it makes the system more unwieldy. So there are really three stages to a prospective new party or candidate (like the Greens or Nader): 1. the candidate is not competitive (e.g. fringe candidate). 2. the candidate is competitive but either not strong enough to win, or there's been a miscalculation by the voters. 3. the candidate has taken over the position that would belong to a competitor (e.g. Nader becomes the new Gore). I think Approval advocates argue that the relative share of approvals will inform the voters of where they are. So the progression goes something like: In stage one, everybody who approves of Nader also approves of Gore. In stage three, the tables are turned: everybody who approves of Gore also approves of Nader, but Nader still wins. Stage two and the transition to three is the tricky part. In rounds of repeated polling, the voters start off cautious (approving both Nader and Gore). Then they see that Nader has approval close to Gore's level, so some start approving of Nader alone. This then reinforces the perception that Nader is winning, so more voters approve of Nader alone. And so it goes until Nader is slightly ahead of Gore and wins. Aha! But what if what is likely happens in stage two: People get ahead of themselves and give their full support to Nader
Re: [EM] List issues?
Well, I did put my computer consultant hat on (my day job) and this is what I found: With regard to the 2 or 3 emails that showed up on the list archive page but not in my inbox, 1) They did not show up in my inbox in Outlook 2) Nor did they show up in my webmail, since Outlook is configured to leave a copy on the server 3) Nor are they in the Bulk Mail folder of my Webmail I am at a loss to come up with a plausible explanation of the above apart from the idea that those emails were either never sent (list-serv issue) of somehow were sent but didn't make it to my mail server @ godaddy (no idea how that might happen, I include it for the sake of completeness.) Anyways, just wanted the list-serv admins to know about this, will let you guys know if I see any other strange behavior. -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 From: Jameson Quinn [mailto:jameson.qu...@gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2013 5:45 AM To: Benjamin Grant Subject: Re: [EM] List issues? I don't think it's a general problem. Perhaps it's something about your spam filter or your mail client's threading algorithm. 2013/6/17 Benjamin Grant b...@4efix.com mailto:b...@4efix.com I have noticed a few times, now, over the last several days where I have sent something to the list, and I don't receive a copy of my own email back from the list. Most of the time, I do - but on at least 2 or 3 occasions I have written something to the list - and I can see it at least made it to the archive here: http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2013-J une/thread.html BUT I never get a copy of it in my inbox as I am supposed to. Is this a known issue with this list, that sometimes you don't get copies of the stuff you send? Is it worse than that, do you sometimes not get copies of the stuff *other* people send too? -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] Deconstructing the Majority Criterion
Thanks for your reply, lets see what I can grasp on this pass, shall we? ;) From: Jameson Quinn [mailto:jameson.qu...@gmail.com] Sent: Sunday, June 16, 2013 10:36 PM Subject: Re: [EM] Voting Criteria 101, Four Criteria 2013/6/16 Benjamin Grant b...@4efix.com mailto:b...@4efix.com Re: Majority Criteria: To be honest, I am worried that some (or all) of your history lesson regarding Arrow might not have landed as well as it should in my brain. Sorry. Sometimes I tend to try to say things too succinctly, and end up leaving my meaning a bit locked up in jargon or terminology. If you have any specific questions about the history lesson I'd be happy to expand. No problem, I may return to that. freely assign a score of 0 to the maximum amount to each candidate (say 100), the candidate with the greatest aggregate score wins) let me see how this might fail. Lets say out of 1000 people 550 give candidate A scores of 100. Then lets say that 700 people give candidate B scores of 80 each. Lets also say that everyone else falls short of either of those totals. A gets 55,000 total, B gets 56,000. B wins. Right. On the one hand, one could say in one sense this violates Majority, but in another sense one could perhaps with even more justification claim that B actually has the larger majority. Or maybe to put another way, Majority criteria only applies to voters when the system is one person, 1 vote others perhaps Majority criteria applies to *votes*, not voters. In other words, maybe Majority criteria should be worded thusly: If one candidate is preferred by an absolute majority of *votes*, then that candidate must win. That would be stretching the criterion to the point of meaninglessness. The majority criterion speaks of voters, and Range doesn't pass, but Bucklin systems do. The more controversial case for this criterion is approval. Some try to define the criterion so that an internal preference which doesn't fit on the ballot is enough to constitute a majority; others prefer to define it so that a majority only means anything in terms of the ballots themselves. I tend to side with the latter as a matter of definition, but I certainly understand that as a practical matter approval's passing of the majority criterion leaves much to be desired. So my takeaway I think is that vis-à-vis voting systems, there are 3 kinds of voting systems with regard to the Majority criterion: systems that fulfil the criterion, systems that fail it, and systems in which majority makes no sense. I would say that First Past the Post would be an example of the 1st it is easy to see that FPTP fulfils Majority, as if over 50% of the votes cast are for A, then A wins, always. An (admittedly lame) example of the 2nd a system that fails the Majority Criterion, is the following: Of all candidates on the ballot, the one that gets the least votes, wins. Call this LPTP (Last Past the Post) However, lets look at Score Voting again which I *think* can work like this: each voter gives each candidate a score from 0 to 9 on their ballot, with empty spots being treated as 0. Then add up all the scores for each candidate, the one with the highest total score wins. Now lets look at the following election being run that way: 45 votes give Candidate A a score of 9, Candidate B a score of 6, Candidate C a score of 0, and Candidate D a score of 3 20 votes give A:0, B:6, C:9, and D:3 20 votes give A:0 B:6 C:3 D:9 15 votes give A:6 B:9 C:3 D:0 The totals are A:495 B:645 C:285 D:375 so B wins. My thought is that perhaps in the context of this vote, the concept of majority as applied in the first two example (FPTP and LPTP) doesnt work here. I also think that changing the definition of majority so that it is intelligible here will make it less understandable in the context of FPTP/LPTP. Maybe what I am wondering is, is the context of some of these voting system so different that *some* concepts like majority do not make sense in all contexts, and that trying to alter the definition to make it fit better in one context makes it fit worse in others? As originally written, I think, the Majority criterion states that: if one candidate is preferred by a majority (more than 50%) of voters, then that candidate must win Well, in the above Score Voting system context, the concept of preference as an all or nothing trait makes no sense. You could has scores of A:9 B:6 C:3 D:1 and be said to in some sense express some amount of preference for each of them. The only way in which the criterion would make sense is if we mutated the criterion somewhat like this: if one candidate is preferred (at the highest score or ranking, where such exists) by a majority (more than 50%) of voters, then that candidate must win OK, lets create a new Score Voting election, four candidates, 100 voters, 0-9 scores: 51 votes: A:9 B:7 C:4 D:0 29 votes: A:0 B:5 C:6 D:9 11 votes: A:1 B
[EM] Participation Criteria and Bucklin - perhaps they *can* work together after all?
It occurred to me that the reason we are failing the Participation Criteria with Bucklin in the below example: 49: X:1st Y:4th 50: X:5th Y:4th Y wins. Now we add two votes: 2: X:3rd Y:2nd X wins. is because we are letting people skip grades/places. Or to put another way, if we asked the voters under Bucklin to fill out each ballot more strictly, ranking 1st through Nth where there are N candidates - I know that several do not like this approach, *but* my question is this - does *strictly ranked* Bucklin fail Participation?? 49: X:1st Y:2nd 50: X:2nd Y:1st Y wins on 1st round. Now we add two votes: 2: X:2nd Y:1st Y still wins on first round. In other words, I *think* what's bringing in the issues with Participation is the gaps in the ranking the first approach permits. Is it? If so, it may be that Bucklin can be quite Participation compliant, so long as you take certain steps like mandating a ranked order among your choices on the ballot. -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Voting Criteria 101, Four Criteria
OK, now on to the questions and responses on the other Criteria: From: Jameson Quinn [mailto:jameson.qu...@gmail.com] Sent: Sunday, June 16, 2013 10:36 PM Subject: Re: [EM] Voting Criteria 101, Four Criteria In which case it (I think) becomes even more obvious and pointless as a criteria (as any system that gave the victory to people who get less votes, however we are counting and measuring votes, would make no sense, I think.) Name: Participation Description: If a ballot is added which prefers A to B, the addition of the ballot must not change the winner from A to B Thoughts: This seems to make sense. If we do not require this, then we permit voting systems where trying to vote sincerely harms your interests. Also, any voting system that would fail Participation would be I think fragile and react in not always predictable ways - like IRV. SO this seems to me to be a solid requirement, that I can't imagine a system that failed this Criterion to have some other benefit so wonderful to make failing Participation worth overlooking - I cannot imagine it. You have fairly described the participation criterion. I would ask you to consider that this criterion focuses only on the direction of preference, not its strength; and so it is inevitably biased towards preferential systems, and dooms you to live within the limits set by Arrow's theorem. My two favorite systems - SODA voting and the as-yet-unnamed version of Bucklin - both fail this criterion, though I would argue they do so in relatively rare and minor ways, and both satisfy some weakened version of the criterion. I don't understand how a bias exists here. In every case I can currently imagine, if an election as it stands has A winning, and one more ballot is added which still prefers A to B, why should that ever cause the winner to change to B? Range/Score Voting: If A is winning, and the following ballot was added (A:90, B:89) A would still be winning. If IRV is being used and the following ballot is added (D first place, A second place, B third place) we wouldn't want B to suddenly be beating A. (Although in IRV I guess it could happen, but the point is that we wouldn't want it to, right?) This seems to be a serious issue. Whatever the voting method, if A is currently winning, and one more ballot gets added that happens to favor A with relation to B, how could it EVER be a good thing if B somehow becomes the winner through the addition of that ballot? I don't understand what bias has to do with the answer to that question? Also, how could Bucklin (as I understand it) *ever* fail this one? Because a ballot added that favors A to B under Bucklin would at minimum increase A by the same amount as B, possibly more, but would *never* increase B more than A, else the ballot could not be said to prefer A over B, right? OK, that's several questions. When would participation failure ever be a good thing? It wouldn't. But in voting theory, tradeoffs are common. A system which had other desirable features could fail a reasonable-sounding criterion, and if that failure is minor and/or rare enough, that could still be a good system. I'd argue that that's the case for Bucklin systems and the participation criterion. Though there are certainly many people here who would argue with me on that specific point, the fact is that choosing any system involves making tradeoffs. So, how does Bucklin fail participation? Imagine you had the following votes, giving candidates X and Y grades A-F 49: X:A Y:D 50: X:F Y:D The bloc of 50 voters is a majority, so they set the median. Or in Bucklin terms, Y reaches a majority at grade D, while X doesn't until grade F, so Y wins. Now add 2 votes with X:C Y:B. Now, X reaches a majority at grade B, while Y still doesn't until grade D. So now X wins, even though those votes favored the prior winner Y. I find this specific example implausible for multiple reasons, and think that actual cases of participation failure would be very rare. For instance, those last two voters could have voted X:F Y:B, and honestly expressed their preference without changing the result. OK, first of all, my brain does not seem to be able to handle letters on both sides of the colon (:), so with your permission, let me alter the typography of your example, hopefully functionally changing nothing: 49: X:1st Y:4th 50: X:5th Y:4th So if I understand this right, under Bucklin, we look at all 1st place votes (we need at least 50), and see if we have over half - we don't, so now we look at all 2nd, still no, all 3rd, still no, and only when we consider 4th place do we finally have enough votes for candidate Y to have enough to win. Now we add two votes: 2: X:3rd Y:2nd Now we repeat the process, not enough 1st place votes (we need at least 51), not enough 2nd place votes, and adding in 3rd place we now have 51, precisely what we need for X to win. OK I think I see what
Re: [EM] Voting Criteria 101, Four Criteria
-Original Message- From: Kristofer Munsterhjelm [mailto:km_el...@lavabit.com] Sent: Monday, June 17, 2013 12:09 PM Subject: Re: [EM] Voting Criteria 101, Four Criteria On 06/16/2013 06:55 PM, Benjamin Grant wrote: *Name*: *_Plurality_* *Description*: If A gets more first preference ballots than B, A must not lose to B. Be careful not to mistake Plurality, the criterion, from Plurality the method. Plurality, the criterion, says: If there are two candidates X and Y so that X has more first place votes than Y has any place votes, then Y shouldn't win. The Plurality criterion is only relevant when the voters may truncate their ballots. In it, there's an assumption that listed candidates are ranked higher than non-listed ones - a sort of Approval assumption, if you will. To show a concrete example: say a voter votes A first, B second, and leaves C off the ballot. Furthermore say nobody actually ranks C. Then C shouldn't win, because A has more first-place votes than C has any-place votes. OK, that makes sense. *Name: _Majority_* *Thoughts*: I might be missing something here, but this seems like a no-brainer. If over 50% of the voters want someone, they should get him, any other approach would seem to create minority rule? I guess a challenge to this criteria might be the following: using Range Voting, A gets a 90 range vote from 60 out of 100 voters, while B gets an 80 from 80 out of 100 voters. A's net is 5400, but B's net is 6400, so B would win (everyone else got less). Does this fail the Majority Criterion, because A got a higher vote from over half, or does it fulfill Majority because B's net was greater than A's net?? There are usually two arguments against the Majority criterion from those that like cardinal methods. First, there's the pizza example: say three people are deciding on what piza to get. Two of them prefer pepperoni to everything else, but the last person absolutely can't have pepperoni. Then, the argument goes, it would be unreasonable and unflexible to pick the pepperoni pizza just because a majority wanted it. Second, there's the redistribution argument. Consider a public election where a candidate wants to confiscate everything a certain minority owns and then distribute the loot to the majority. If the electorate is simple enough, a majority might vote for that candidate, but the choice would not be a good one. Briefly: the argument against Majority is tyranny of majority. But ranked methods can't know whether any given election is a tyranny-of-majority one, and between erring in favor of the majority and in favor of a minority (which might not be a good minority at all), the former's better. Condorcet's jury theorem is one way of formalizing that. In my (limited) experience, every instance where there has been an allegation of tyranny of the majority, the reverse choice is something even worse, tyranny of the minority. While ultimately certain things, like human rights, shouldn't be a matter for voting at all, if something deserves a vote it probably deserves to serve the greatest good for the greatest number. To take your pizza analogy, if the two people *only* want pepperoni, it would be selfish of the third to expect the majority to bend to his desires. On the other hand, if the two people are already fine with *either* pepperoni or plain, then they will say so. Ultimately, the only time I find when people complain about the tyranny of the majority is when they are in a minority that doesn't want what the majority truly does - and that's just the downside of not being a dictator. So I guess I would say this - whenever you hear the phrase tyranny of the majority, you can probably indentify the speaker is *usually* someone who wants more power over the selection process than they ought to have. *Name: _Participation_* *Description*: If a ballot is added which prefers A to B, the addition of the ballot must not change the winner from A to B *Thoughts*: This seems to make sense. If we do not require this, then we permit voting systems where trying to vote sincerely harms your interests. Also, any voting system that would fail Participation would be I think fragile and react in not always predictable ways - like IRV. SO this seems to me to be a solid requirement, that I can't imagine a system that failed this Criterion to have some other benefit so wonderful to make failing Participation worth overlooking - I cannot imagine it. Welcome to the unintuitive world of voting methods :-) Arrow's theorem says you can't have unanimity (if everybody agrees that AB, B does not win), IIA (as you mention below) and non-dictatorship. Since one can't give up the latter two and have anything like a good ranked voting method, that means every method must fail IIA. Wow. I am just starting to get exposed to this stuff, but it is being a bitter pill to swallow
Re: [EM] Participation Criteria and Bucklin - perhaps they *can* work together after all?
From: Jameson Quinn [mailto:jameson.qu...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, June 17, 2013 12:15 PM Subject: Re: Participation Criteria and Bucklin - perhaps they *can* work together after all? 2013/6/17 Benjamin Grant b...@4efix.com mailto:b...@4efix.com is because we are letting people skip grades/places. Or to put another way, if we asked the voters under Bucklin to fill out each ballot more strictly, ranking 1st through Nth where there are N candidates - I know that several do not like this approach, *but* my question is this - does *strictly ranked* Bucklin fail Participation?? Yes. Just add 500 other candidates, and fill in the gaps with randomly-selected candidates from the 500. Obviously, you could probably get by with a lot less than 500 - at a rough guess, I'd expect that 8 would be plenty without changing the numbers here, and probably around 4-6 would be enough to make a similar example with smaller gaps work, but my point is that with enough extra candidates who cluster at the bottom of most ballots, you can turn any rated scenario into a ranked scenario. You are being tempted by a mirage here. The first lesson of voting school kindergarten is that most problems don't have a perfect solution. That doesn't mean you stop looking for ways to improve things, but it does mean that when you imagine a fix, you do your best to shoot holes in your own idea. 95% of the time you'll succeed, but the other 5% still makes it worth it. Jameson Oh. That's disappointing. I have to see it with my own eyes, although I am sure you know what you are talking about, my brain won't let me move on until I see the disproof. So I will try to create one - a situation where in using strictly ranked Bucklin, adding a new ballot in which A is ranked higher than B, this new ballot somehow switches the winner from A to B. The challenge is that its intuitively seems like such an impossible task, I am worried that should such an example be possible (and you say it is, and I believe you) I might never find it in my blind spot! So if anyone *has* a handy example of this, I would be grateful for it being brought to my attention, otherwise, I am going to have to try to create it on my own in my own blind spot. Thanks. :) -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [CES #8791] Upper-Bucklin naming (was: Median systems, branding....)
A humorous (but utterly non-serious) thought just occurred to me: What voting method are you guys going to use to elect a name for this new system? Kidding! :) -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 From: election-methods-boun...@lists.electorama.com [mailto:election-methods-boun...@lists.electorama.com] On Behalf Of Jameson Quinn Sent: Monday, June 17, 2013 1:10 PM To: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax Cc: electionscie...@googlegroups.com; election-methods Subject: Re: [EM] [CES #8791] Upper-Bucklin naming (was: Median systems, branding) Two points: 1. I chatted with Rob Brown about the upper Bucklin naming question. His votes were: IRAV: F DAT: B Median Ranking: A Median Rating: A Median Grade: A Cumulative Best Approval (CBA): B I myself would give those latter four options C, C, B, and A respectively. Here are my votes on Andy's proposals. I think his point about two words is well-taken, but I'm not going to change my existing votes. Also, I think an appropriate enough acronym could allow 3 letters/words. -Majority Approval Voting: A -Delayed Approval Voting: D -Approval Level Voting: D -Delayed Support Voting: C -Majority Support Voting: B -Support Level Voting: F -Gradual Support Voting: C -Gradual Approval Voting: B In the spirit of his two-level-only dictum, here are a few more ideas: -Cumulative Approval Voting: A -Cumulative Support Voting: A -Cumulative Majority Voting: B (But CMV rings a bell, and I don't think it's just for cytomegalovirus; is there already a CMV voting system proposal?) -As above, but replace Cumulative with additive: 1 grade lower. -ABC (Approval-Based Cumulative) voting: C (I like the acronym, especially if we're using letter grades; but I am not satisfied with this backronym. Anyone else have ideas? Approval, additive; building, based, best, biggest; cumulative, cutoff, classify... ) So currently Descending Approval Threshold (DAT) is in the lead with a median of B. Please add your votes before Wednesday; until then, I'll just use my favorite of whatever terms currently lead, but wrap it in ¿? question marks. 2. I was thinking about how to give a GMJ-like single number for reporting a candidate's results under ¿DAT?, and I realized that the GMJ formula itself could work with some adjustments. The formula is: Median + (V - V) / (2 * V=) Where V, V, and V= are votes above, below, and at the median. ¿DAT? can use the same formula as long as you replace V with some number that's constant across candidates for a given election and median, and replace V= with (Vtot - (V + V)). (It could also in principle work for a constant V= if that was large enough, but I don't like that idea as much.) So what should we use for the fake V for reporting? Using the average (or even better, geometric mean) of the real V numbers for that election and median would give the most-realistic numbers. But even a simple constant, like 1/(2*number of grades)=10% wouldn't be too bad. Anyway, the point is that you could pretty clearly find a way to report ¿DAT? results using one number per candidate, which removes one of my last good reasons to prefer GMJ. And that way comes from GMJ, so my work on GMJ isn't a total loss, which removes one of my last bad reasons to prefer GMJ :). So, pending naming, I think ¿DAT? is the future of Bucklin systems. Jameson Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [CES #8791] Upper-Bucklin naming (was: Median systems, branding....)
You just scared me, asking me how I vote, I don't feel qualified to have an opinion, I haven't even focused on the conversation enough to know the precise system you are talking about, so I was mostly just trying to stay out of the way and let me elders do their business. :) If for some reason I can't explain you really want my opinion on this, then I would unfortunately have to ask two questions that were probably answered earlier when I was paying attention to other things: How does the unnamed system work, and what are the naming choices again? But again, please know that I mostly am just trying to stay out of everyone's way while I am trying to get up to speed, which I am guessing for me will be long and slow. ;) -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 From: Jameson Quinn [mailto:jameson.qu...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, June 17, 2013 1:28 PM To: Benjamin Grant Cc: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax; electionscie...@googlegroups.com; election-methods Subject: Re: [EM] [CES #8791] Upper-Bucklin naming (was: Median systems, branding) 2013/6/17 Benjamin Grant b...@4efix.com mailto:b...@4efix.com A humorous (but utterly non-serious) thought just occurred to me: What voting method are you guys going to use to elect a name for this new system? The system itself, of course. So what do you vote? It's fine if you leave out any vote under C. And if you don't fully understand the system, all the better, because in that respect you're more like the average voter than I am. Jameson Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Participation Criteria and Bucklin - perhaps they *can* work together after all?
Wrapping my brain around it now, sorry if I am slow on the uptake, will post later. :) -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 From: Jameson Quinn [mailto:jameson.qu...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, June 17, 2013 1:25 PM To: Benjamin Grant Cc: EM Subject: Re: Participation Criteria and Bucklin - perhaps they *can* work together after all? Previously we had: 49: X:1st Y:4th 50: X:5th Y:4th Y wins. Now we add two votes: 2: X:3rd Y:2nd X wins. So to make a ranked example: 49: XpqYrstuabcdef 49: XutYsrpqfedcba 50: abcYXdefpqrstu 50: fedYXcbautsrpq Add 4 votes: 4: aXYbcdefpqrstu Now I added 12 candidates there, but I'm sure with a little work I could get it down to somewhere in the range of just 4-8 extra candidates. But the point is made. Jameson 2013/6/17 Benjamin Grant b...@4efix.com mailto:b...@4efix.com From: Jameson Quinn [mailto:jameson.qu...@gmail.com mailto:jameson.qu...@gmail.com ] Sent: Monday, June 17, 2013 12:15 PM Subject: Re: Participation Criteria and Bucklin - perhaps they *can* work together after all? 2013/6/17 Benjamin Grant b...@4efix.com mailto:b...@4efix.com is because we are letting people skip grades/places. Or to put another way, if we asked the voters under Bucklin to fill out each ballot more strictly, ranking 1st through Nth where there are N candidates - I know that several do not like this approach, *but* my question is this - does *strictly ranked* Bucklin fail Participation?? Yes. Just add 500 other candidates, and fill in the gaps with randomly-selected candidates from the 500. Obviously, you could probably get by with a lot less than 500 - at a rough guess, I'd expect that 8 would be plenty without changing the numbers here, and probably around 4-6 would be enough to make a similar example with smaller gaps work, but my point is that with enough extra candidates who cluster at the bottom of most ballots, you can turn any rated scenario into a ranked scenario. You are being tempted by a mirage here. The first lesson of voting school kindergarten is that most problems don't have a perfect solution. That doesn't mean you stop looking for ways to improve things, but it does mean that when you imagine a fix, you do your best to shoot holes in your own idea. 95% of the time you'll succeed, but the other 5% still makes it worth it. Jameson Oh. That's disappointing. I have to see it with my own eyes, although I am sure you know what you are talking about, my brain won't let me move on until I see the disproof. So I will try to create one - a situation where in using strictly ranked Bucklin, adding a new ballot in which A is ranked higher than B, this new ballot somehow switches the winner from A to B. The challenge is that its intuitively seems like such an impossible task, I am worried that should such an example be possible (and you say it is, and I believe you) I might never find it in my blind spot! So if anyone *has* a handy example of this, I would be grateful for it being brought to my attention, otherwise, I am going to have to try to create it on my own in my own blind spot. Thanks. :) -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Participation Criteria and Bucklin - perhaps they *can* work together after all?
From: Jameson Quinn [mailto:jameson.qu...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, June 17, 2013 1:25 PM Subject: Re: Participation Criteria and Bucklin - perhaps they *can* work together after all? So to make a ranked example: 49: XpqYrstuabcdef 49: XutYsrpqfedcba 50: abcYXdefpqrstu 50: fedYXcbautsrpq OK, Y wins this one. Add 4 votes: 4: aXYbcdefpqrstu And now X wins this one. BUT I'm am still confused, Participation Criterion says: Adding one or more ballots that vote X over Y should never change the winner from X to Y In this case the winner was NOT changed from X to Y, but from Y to X, so this is NOT an example of failing the Participation Criteria, is it? Am I missing something here? -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [CES #8791] Upper-Bucklin naming (was: Median systems, branding....)
From: Jameson Quinn [mailto:jameson.qu...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, June 17, 2013 2:20 PM Subject: Re: [EM] [CES #8791] Upper-Bucklin naming (was: Median systems, branding) Here's the description of the unnamed system as Abd gave it: Count the votes at 1st Choice for each candidate. If a single candidate has a majority, this canditate wins. If not, add in lower choices, one at a time, until a candidate or candidates gains a majority. If two or more candidates reach a majority at a stage, then whichever candidate has the most votes above that stage wins. If this is 1st Choice, or if all the choices have been amalgamated, and no candidate has a majority, then the candidate with the most votes wins. The naming choices with significant support are (current voting tallies in parentheses, ordered JQ/AL/RB/AJ) Instant Runoff Approval Voting: (B/A/F/C) Descending Approval Threshold Voting: (A/B-/B/C) Majority Approval Voting: (A/?/C/A) Majority Support Voting: (B/?/C/A) Cumulative Approval Voting: (A/?/B/?) Cumulative Support Voting: (A/?/B/?) Assuming question marks as F's, DAT is currently leading, but I think the last two are promising. Jameson Well, that sounds a lot like the system we have be talking about in the other thread. DAT sounds confusing to me in this context. One of the Cumulatives makes the most sense instinctually to me as (if I understand this correctly) we keep adding in more ranks until we get enough to answer the question. IRAV makes it seem like a flavor of IRV, which in my full lack of experience seems wrong (Buckley seems unlike IRV), so I guess I would vote something like this: Instant Runoff Approval Voting: F Descending Approval Threshold Voting: F Majority Approval Voting: D Majority Support Voting: D Cumulative Approval Voting: A Cumulative Support Voting: C Unless I have to rank them in order and not use the same rank twice, in which case I would do: Cumulative Approval Voting: 1st Cumulative Support Voting: 2nd Majority Support Voting: 3rd Majority Approval Voting: 4th Descending Approval Threshold Voting: 5th Instant Runoff Approval Voting: 6th And just for giggles, here's my ScoreVoting (0-100) ballot: Cumulative Approval Voting: 100 Cumulative Support Voting: 80 Majority Support Voting: 60 Majority Approval Voting: 50 Descending Approval Threshold Voting: 35 Instant Runoff Approval Voting: 0 I tried to answer all the above as sincerely and non-strategically as possible. Hope this helps. If any of the above is dumb, chuck it, please. ;) -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Participation Criteria and Bucklin - perhaps they *can* work together after all?
OK, let's assume that as defined, Bucklin fails Participation. Let me specify a new criteria, which already either has its own name that I do not know, or which I can call Prime Participation: Adding one or more ballots that vote X as a highest preference should never change the winner from X to Y In other words, expressing a first place/greatest magnitude preference for X, if X was already winning, cannot make X not win. This may be another one so basic that few or maybe no real voting systems fail it? -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [CES #8791] Upper-Bucklin naming (was: Median systems, branding....)
I guess (assuming I am allowed to duplicate ratings) I would call Additive Approval Voting an E (if we are using ABCDEF) - I like it better than DAT and IRAV, but less well than all the others. If E is not allowed, I guess flip a coin as to whether it gets a D or F. On a side note, it's interesting how having this vote makes me more directly aware of the voting system than thinking abstractly about it. -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 From: Jameson Quinn [mailto:jameson.qu...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, June 17, 2013 3:04 PM To: Benjamin Grant Cc: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax; electionscie...@googlegroups.com; election-methods Subject: Re: [EM] [CES #8791] Upper-Bucklin naming (was: Median systems, branding) New running tally. Current voting tallies in parentheses, ordered JQ/AL/RB/AJ/DSH/BG. Note the new option for Additive Approval Voting, which could be a winner if Abd, Andy, and Ben like it enough. Current contenders for best are in bold. Instant Runoff Approval Voting: (B/A/F/C/F/F) Median C/F. Descending Approval Threshold Voting: (A/B-/B/C/C/F) Median B-/C. Majority Approval Voting: (A/?/C/A/A/D) Median A/C Majority Support Voting: (B/?/C/A/C/D) Median C Cumulative Approval Voting: (A/?/B/?/D/A) Median B/D Additive Approval Voting: (B/?/B/?/B/?) Median B/? Cumulative Support Voting: (A/?/B/?/F/C) Median C/? Jameson Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] Shout out of thanks
I just wanted to thank everyone for being so helpful and guiding me in learning this stuff. You are all quite generous with your time, and I appreciate it. I am especially looking forward to the response on the concept of fragility or extreme sensitivity with regard to voting systems, as I developed in my other post. Thanks everyone! This is a very tough and tricky subject, and without all of your help, I would be in deep trouble. -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] List issues?
I have noticed a few times, now, over the last several days where I have sent something to the list, and I don't receive a copy of my own email back from the list. Most of the time, I do - but on at least 2 or 3 occasions I have written something to the list - and I can see it at least made it to the archive here: http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2013-J une/thread.html BUT I never get a copy of it in my inbox as I am supposed to. Is this a known issue with this list, that sometimes you don't get copies of the stuff you send? Is it worse than that, do you sometimes not get copies of the stuff *other* people send too? -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Participation Criteria and Bucklin - perhaps they *can* work together after all?
From: Jameson Quinn [mailto:jameson.qu...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, June 17, 2013 3:14 PM Subject: Re: Participation Criteria and Bucklin - perhaps they *can* work together after all? Unfortunately, Bucklin systems fail that one too. Hold on a sec. Let me think this through. If we are using a Bucklin system, perhaps a strictly ranked one, and X is currently winning. Adding a single ballot that has X ranked as the highest does two things: it changes the threshold, and it awards one more vote to X. The only way it can hurt X - ie, cause X not to win, is if the harm in changing the threshold is greater than the benefit of getting another first place vote. That's the key to why Buckley keep failing Participation!! I think I finally grasped the essential Participation flaw with Buckley!! Each added ballot changes the threshold. Changing the threshold will either have NO effect, or it will change how deep we have to go to find a winner. In this case, even if we know ALL the ballot we are adding have X at the top, adding even a single on if it changes the threshold enough will suddenly bring into your totals all the next place rankings for the existing ballots. In other words, Buckley fails Participation because it is not a smooth curve, it is a fragile one that can leap and lurch, if you see what I am saying. In its own way, Buckley is as unpredictable as IRV. Both have fractal moments where a very small change can completely swamp the system and produce a very different result. Any system as - what's the right word, jagged? sensitive? fragile? is going to have one or more issues with appealing to our common sense, because each has a point in which a tiny change can cause a system wide shift. Am I right? I don't know what this kind of trait is called, this oversensitivity, this ability to suddenly shift from condition One to Condition Two with no smooth transition points in between - but I think these kinds of systems will suffer from problems like these. Now, for all I know ALL voting systems have this kind of issue - we'll see. -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Absolutely new here
Let me put forth (better, I hope) a more complete thought (which is probably one of those Bucklin Variants, as it turns out.) The ballot has every candidate on it. In order to be considered valid, each voter must rank each and every one of them. So with five candidates, a valid ballot might look like: 1st:B/2nd:D/3rd:A/4th:E/5th:C No duplicates, no skipping. Then we create a threshold of just over 50% of the number of votes. If 100 people vote, then 51 is the threshold. We then look at only the 1st place votes. If anyone hit the threshold, they win if they are the only one. If more than one candidate hit the threshold, the one that surpasses the threshold by more wins. If no one yet hits the threshold, add in all the 2nd place votes, and check again. If still no one hits the threshold, add in the 3rd place votes, and so on. It was a thought experiment I was doing, I'm not at all sure, for example, that it might not be better to permit duplicates or skipping. I obviously need to go deeper. I think my next task is to put a pause in the pursuit of different voting systems to focus on understanding better the various criteria (later no harm, Condorcet, etc), in much more depth, ie, what they are each about, what it means that a system fulfills of fails one, etc. I will post more about that shortly - let me know if I am dragging this group to far into voting theory kindergarten, but I really want to get all this. Thanks. -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 From: Jameson Quinn [mailto:jameson.qu...@gmail.com] Sent: Sunday, June 16, 2013 11:20 AM To: Kristofer Munsterhjelm Cc: Benjamin Grant; election-methods@lists.electorama.com Subject: Re: [EM] Absolutely new here As one of the principal advocates for Bucklin systems on this list, I thought I'd expand a bit on Kristofer's excellent response. 2013/6/16 Kristofer Munsterhjelm km_el...@lavabit.com mailto:km_el...@lavabit.com On 06/16/2013 05:26 AM, Benjamin Grant wrote: [...IRV discussion...] [...good response...] 2)I haven't seen a voting system like this - what are the issues with it? Upsides and downsides? A)Each voter ranks their choices on their ballots, first through last place. B)If one candidate got a majority of 1^st place votes, they win. If not, the second place votes are added. If still no majority he third place votes are added, and so on, until one candidate has a majority. Would the above system work? That's Bucklin. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucklin_voting . It's one of the few ranked methods that have been used in political elections in the United States, and it has a connection to median rating (which elects the candidate with highest median rating or grade). It would work, but the rating variant is better. In the context of ranking, Bucklin fails Condorcet, for instance. In case it wasn't clear, by rating, Kristofer means a system with a fixed number of levels of support/opposition (typically 3-7), where voters can any number (including 0) of candidates at a given level. Ranking means that voters must give a strict ordering of candidates, with no ties or skipped ranks. It also has some bullet-voting incentive. In this case, It refers to the ranked version only. Say that you support candidate A. You're reasonably sure it will get quite a number of second-place votes. Then even though you might prefer B to A, it's strategically an advantage to rank A first, because then the method will detect a majority for A sooner. One of the points of the graded/rated variants is to encourage the voters to think in absolute terms (is this candidate good enough to deserve an A) rather than relative terms (is this candidate better than that candidate). If they do, then the method becomes more robust. Thanks. One think Kristofer didn't mention is that your definition wasn't quite complete. What happens if two candidates attain a majority at the same rank, or (in rated versions or due to truncation) no candidate attains a majority without including the bottom support level? Resolving this issue requires a Bucklin completion method, just as resolving cyclical preferences in Condorcet requires a Condorcet completion method. Colloquially, Bucklin completion methods are often called Bucklin tiebreakers. Thus, there are many possible Bucklin systems, including ER-Bucklin (which majority is highest?), Majority Judgment (remove an equal number of ballots at the pivotal/median rating for each candidate until one of them gets a majority at a higher or lower rating), Graduated Majority Judgment (find the candidate who needs the lowest percentage of their ballots at the pivotal/median rating to attain a majority; also expressable as a simple algebraic formula that gives a non-integer score to each candidate), and the as-yet-unnamed method currently being discussed (for instance) here http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail
[EM] Voting Criteria 101, Four Criteria
With your kind indulgence, I would like some assistance in understanding and hopefully mastering the various voting criteria, so that I can more intelligently and accurately understanding the strengths and weaknesses of different voting systems. So, if it's alright, I would like to explain what I understand about some of these voting criteria, a few at a time, perhaps, and perhaps the group would be willing to check my math as it were and see if I actually understand these, one by one? I'll start with what seem to be the simpler ones. (For what it's worth, my understanding comes from various websites that do not always agree with each other. Also, I have the fundamental belief that one cannot consider oneself to have mastered something until and unless one has the ability to understand it well enough to explain it to someone else - which is what I will try to do below, re-explain these criteria as a test to see if I really get them.) Name: Plurality Description: If A gets more first preference ballots than B, A must not lose to B. Thoughts: If I understand this correctly, this is not a critical criteria to my way of thinking. Consider an election with 10 candidates. A gets 13% of the first place votes, more than any other single candidate. And yet B gets 8% of the first place votes, and 46% of the second place votes. It seems obvious to me that B ought to win. And yet, in this circumstance, this violates the above Plurality Criterion. Therefor is seems to be that the Plurality Criterion is not useful, to my way of thinking. Name: Majority Description: If one candidate is preferred by an absolute majority of voters, then that candidate must win. Thoughts: I might be missing something here, but this seems like a no-brainer. If over 50% of the voters want someone, they should get him, any other approach would seem to create minority rule? I guess a challenge to this criteria might be the following: using Range Voting, A gets a 90 range vote from 60 out of 100 voters, while B gets an 80 from 80 out of 100 voters. A's net is 5400, but B's net is 6400, so B would win (everyone else got less). Does this fail the Majority Criterion, because A got a higher vote from over half, or does it fulfill Majority because B's net was greater than A's net?? Name: Participation Description: If a ballot is added which prefers A to B, the addition of the ballot must not change the winner from A to B Thoughts: This seems to make sense. If we do not require this, then we permit voting systems where trying to vote sincerely harms your interests. Also, any voting system that would fail Participation would be I think fragile and react in not always predictable ways - like IRV. SO this seems to me to be a solid requirement, that I can't imagine a system that failed this Criterion to have some other benefit so wonderful to make failing Participation worth overlooking - I cannot imagine it. Name: Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA) Description: Adding a new candidate B to an election that previously A would have won must not cause anyone apart from A or B to win. That is, If A would have won before B was added to the ballot, C must not win now. Thoughts: This also seems fairly non-controversial. This I think is the repudiation of the spoiler effect - that just because Nader enters the race shouldn't disadvantage the candidate that would have won before that happened. This would seem (to me) to also be a good Criterion to hold to in order to encourage more than just two Candidates/Parties always dominating the scene. I wonder what the downside would be to strongly embracing this criteria? Question: It seems to me that another criterion I have heard of - Independence of Clones(IoC) - is a subset of IIA, that if a system satisfies IIA, it would have to satisfy the Independence of Clones criterion as well - is that correct? If not, what system what satisfy IoC but *not* satisfy IIA? Question: it seems like the two above criteria - Participation and IIA - would be related. Is it possible to fail one and not the other? Or does either wind up mandate the other - for example, a system with IIA must also fulfill Participation, or vice versa? So let me stop there for now - I know there are other Criteria, but let me pause so you guys can tell me what I am getting right and what I am getting wrong. Thanks. -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] List question
I submitted a post I was hoping for feedback on called [EM] Voting Criteria 101, Four Criteria at around 1PM EST today. Now it's about 4:30PM EST and I never got a copy of my own post in my mailbox - and I have been getting copies of all my other posts. When I go to the archive site for the list: http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2013-J une/thread.html it is listed there, but I am confused about whether it actually went out to the list or not. If not, I would like to resend it, as I very much want feedback, but I also don't want to spam the list with duplicates - but since I never got a copy of it in my inbox, I am thinking that maybe no one else did either? Whassup? -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] List question
Excellent - I just now got both the email below and your lengthy response - will dive into it now - thanks! :) -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 From: Jameson Quinn [mailto:jameson.qu...@gmail.com] Sent: Sunday, June 16, 2013 4:45 PM To: Benjamin Grant Cc: EM Subject: Re: [EM] List question I have no idea what happened with your mailbox, but I got your message, and indeed just sent a somewhat lengthy response. Jameson 2013/6/16 Benjamin Grant b...@4efix.com mailto:b...@4efix.com I submitted a post I was hoping for feedback on called [EM] Voting Criteria 101, Four Criteria at around 1PM EST today. Now it's about 4:30PM EST and I never got a copy of my own post in my mailbox - and I have been getting copies of all my other posts. When I go to the archive site for the list: http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2013-J une/thread.html it is listed there, but I am confused about whether it actually went out to the list or not. If not, I would like to resend it, as I very much want feedback, but I also don't want to spam the list with duplicates - but since I never got a copy of it in my inbox, I am thinking that maybe no one else did either? Whassup? -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 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] Voting Criteria 101, Four Criteria
, and A would win, but then B enters the race, I can get A still winning. I can get B leaping ahead somehow and winning. What I cannot understand is how a candidate that A was beating before B's entry, somehow A now loses to. At least I cannot understand how any system that fails this criteria could still be worth considering - how the outcome of A beating C *until* B enters the race, after which C wins, is desirable. Is there some example that explain how this turn of events could be somehow fair or sensible? Independence of Clones: since you are saying that IoC is not equivalent with IIA, I will take up IoC independently along the way in a later set of criteria. I still am curious about this question: Question: it seems like the two above criteria - Participation and IIA - would be related. Is it possible to fail one and not the other? Or does either wind up mandating the other - for example, a system with IIA must also fulfill Participation, or vice versa? Thanks for your time and help - and please, anyone who wants to chime in, please do so, this is not just a conversation between myself and Jameson, but between me and the community her. Thanks! :) -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 From: Jameson Quinn [mailto:jameson.qu...@gmail.com] Sent: Sunday, June 16, 2013 4:44 PM To: Benjamin Grant Cc: election-methods@lists.electorama.com Subject: Re: [EM] Voting Criteria 101, Four Criteria 2013/6/16 Benjamin Grant b...@4efix.com mailto:b...@4efix.com ...I would like to explain what I understand about some of these voting criteria, a few at a time... Thanks for doing this, and again, welcome. Name: Plurality Description: If A gets more first preference ballots than B, A must not lose to B. Thoughts: If I understand this correctly, this is not a critical criteria to my way of thinking. Consider an election with 10 candidates. A gets 13% of the first place votes, more than any other single candidate. And yet B gets 8% of the first place votes, and 46% of the second place votes. It seems obvious to me that B ought to win. And yet, in this circumstance, this violates the above Plurality Criterion. Therefor is seems to be that the Plurality Criterion is not useful, to my way of thinking. I think that most here would agree with what you've said. Name: Majority Description: If one candidate is preferred by an absolute majority of voters, then that candidate must win. Presumably, by preferred, you mean preferred over all others. This definition is actually a bit controversial. I'll explain, but I have to go back a bit. Note that all that follows is my personal opinion; it's far too opinionated to pass muster at Wikipedia, and though I suspect that some here would agree with most of it, I'm also sure that others will chime in to debate me on some points. The modern science of voting theory begins with Kenneth Arrow in the 1950s. I happen to be reading Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) at the moment, so I'll use his terms. Before Arrow, the study of single-winner voting systems was disorganized and unscientific; though figures such as Maurice Duverger and Duncan Black had important insights into the incentives of plurality on parties and voters, they could offer little guidance as to how to improve the situation. Arrow offered the first paradigm for the field. The Arrovian paradigm is essentially preferential, and it tends to lead toward Condorcet systems as being best. From its very beginning, Arrow's own theorem marked sharp limits to how far you could go within his paradigm. Nonetheless, as Kuhn quotes from Bacon, error leads to truth more quickly than confusion; that is, even a flawed paradigm is immensely more productive than prescientific disorganization. For instance, the important Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem on strategy followed close on the heels of Arrow's result. Since Arrow, there have been other paradigms advanced. Around 1980, Steven Brams suggested Approval Voting, a simple idea which prior to that had been used but never theorized. This was clearly a step out of the Arrovian paradigm, but it didn't quite yet offer an alternative basis for further research and refinement. Donald Saari then reacted against approval by advancing a paradigm based on ordinal ballots and mathematical symmetry (and thus, Borda voting); in my opinion, his willful ignorance of strategic issues makes his way of thinking ultimately counterproductive, though some of the tools he created are useful. So the first person to offer a truly fertile alternative to the Arrovian paradigm was, in my opinion, Warren Smith (active on this list), with his 1999 paper on Range Voting. This system, now mostly called Score Voting, goes beyond approval to allow fractional ratings. The division between Arrovian, preferential systems, and Score-like systems has been expressed using multiple terms: ranked
[EM] Absolutely new here
I just started trying to wrap my brain around all the ins and outs about voting methods, and I wanted to check two things with my elders (on this subject): 1) As far as I can see, the reason IRV has some strange/unusual results is because it is absolutely critical what order you eliminate candidates. So an election where Voting Bloc 1 has a 13% share of the ballots and Voting Bloc 2 has a 16% share of the ballots can utterly flip around using IRV if VB1 goes up two points and VB2 goes down 2. Because with IRV, the order of elimination is really the first-most deciding factor in who wins. For example, here are three different scenarios: 40%A B D C 25 C B D A 20 D B C A 15 B A C D WINNER: A (the topline means of course that 40% put candidate A first, B second, D third, and C last.) 40%A B D C 25 C B D A 26 D B C A 9 B A C D WINNER: D 40%A B D C 25 C B D A 17 D B C A 18 B A C D WINNER: B A few percent either way on the last line changes *everything*. This seems to be a flaw with IRV, yes? It is too sensitive on small changes because they can change the order of elimination. 2) I haven't seen a voting system like this - what are the issues with it? Upsides and downsides? A) Each voter ranks their choices on their ballots, first through last place. B) If one candidate got a majority of 1st place votes, they win. If not, the second place votes are added. If still no majority he third place votes are added, and so on, until one candidate has a majority. Would the above system work? Thanks, very new to all these considerations, still trying to learn the names of the different methods as well as the names and meaning of the different criteria like Condorcet, Later No Harm, etc. -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting mailto:b...@4efix.com b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
