administrators

@abel I suppose you could see the primary system as a bit of a gamble in this sense. You want to beat the other party, but you also want to do so with a candidate that is as popular as possible within the party. If your party is favourite to win anyway, you might be more inclined to just pick the most popular candidate within the party. If it's a closer election you might look at who is most likely to beat the other party. So there would be some balancing.

@bmjacobs OK, I think I get that. But I still don't think the graph is correct - it's giving a different measurement for a deterministic and non-deterministic systems. For non-deterministic methods, it seems to be working on the probability of getting elected, which I presume is what the "controlled winning probability" on the y axis means. But for the deterministic methods, it just gives a score of 100 if they are guaranteed to be elected and 0 otherwise.

If it's a about guaranteed election then the non-deterministic methods should give 0 across the board. If it's probabilistic, then the non-deterministic methods are correct on the graph but the deterministic ones are wrong - though there isn't an exact probability you can give as it depends on voting patterns.

@bmjacobs Interesting article, but a couple of things. Where does it come from that in Borda you need 2/3 of the vote to ensure a win? Also Borda and winner-takes-all systems wouldn't have the step function if there are more than two candidates. E.g. having 40% of the vote under First Past the Post will still give you the win in many elections. If it's to guarantee the win then yes, but I don't think it's clear that that's what the graph is trying to say.

@mkeypaige A lot of those topics have Wikipedia or Electowiki pages, which describe them quite well, and there are also YouTube videos which discuss a lot of them. Some of the later stuff I wouldn't even know what they are. But I'll give you some links.

Ranked voting - Wikipedia

1. Plurality system (also known as First Past the Post) - Wikipedia, CGP Grey video

2. Ranked Choice Voting (also known as Instant Runoff Voting, Alternative Vote among others): Wikipedia, CGP Grey video

3. Condorcet methods: Wikipedia, Carneades.org video

4. Borda Count: Wikipedia, Carneades.org video

5. Majority criterion: Wikipedia, Becky Moening video

6. Unanimity criterion: Wikipedia article on Pareto Efficiency, Eric Pacuit video

7. Condorcet winner criterion: Wikipedia, Carneades.org video

8. Monotonicity criterion: Electowiki article, Becky Moening video

9. IIA (Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives) criterion: Wikipedia, Carneades.org video

10. Manipulability: Wikipedia article on strategic voting, Katherine Heller video

11. Random dictator: Wikipedia article, Carneades.org video

12. Approval voting: Wikipedia, CGP Grey video

That's the first section covered. Let me know if this is useful at all and I can get some links for the others.

@jack-waugh I think anything except the minimum for unmarked candidates makes it too easy to mark bullet burials. But I don’t know.

@masiarek this may be slightly tangential, but another consideration for the future is making sure any encryption in voting systems is also quantum secure.

Youtube Video

@wolftune IRV wasn’t largely in the public consciousness of the USA until groups like FairVote started promoting it in the 1990s. It took a decade for acknowledgment of the system to grow, and by then it had subsumed the name “ranked choice.” So it wasn’t as if people made a concerted effort to change the widely accepted name in that case. In fact, I would say more people try to reverse the name change, because it’s a presumptuous moniker that obscures other ranked choice systems.

Anyway, maybe there are examples. But I doubt whether they were efforts not in line with the mainstream or status quo.

@wolftune I agree it’s a bit of a misnomer. It’s hard to change names after history has etched them down. I started calling it “support” voting, referring to the mathematical support of a distribution. It also has less connotation than “approve.” Maybe it’ll change! But we still call “choose one” “FPTP” and “plurality” more often than “choose one.”

@jack-waugh “…more than one ‘vote’ per voter…” I always find this so silly. Nobody bothers to define what a “vote” is to begin with, so what is being counted? The correct, fair thing that, as far as I can tell, can apply universally is: one ballot per voter.

Seriously, maybe I’m a jerk, but I think we should all perhaps be reading a bit more Aristotle in public school. As required reading.

(Then again that wouldn’t serve the status quo)