Proposed options for "voting on voting methods"
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I am planning on holding a vote for favorite voting method, as I've been talking about doing forever.
I've narrowed them down to 8 choices. While we don't have a voting widget yet, this will just be done in a regular thread, where you can vote by just posting your vote. It's ok if you edit your vote after the fact (please just note that you've done it in your post).
We're assuming these are for single winner, political elections.
I don't want too many choices, especially when the differences are extremely subtle. Some of them are inclusive of several different varieties, you can assume you are voting the "best" variety. I am open to adding new options, if I've missed something major. We can always have votes for subcategories at some point in the future.
I will tabulate it and make my tabulations available in a Codepen, so anyone can fork it and add whatever they want and do their own tabulation. I will tabulate it in various methods. The ballot approach (cardinal ballots, 0-10, floating point ok) is intended to be high enough resolution that it can be tabulated under any method.
I hope to do this with some regularity. Anyone else can do this if they want, but I'd appreciate it if you let the first one play out before you do your own poll.
I'm hoping to post this both here as well as on reddit's EndFPTP subreddit, in the near future.
This thread is not the vote itself, this is simply a pre-vote discussion. Please feel free to weigh in.
These are the options I'm thinking of (edit: I lengthened the names, and replaced STRL with Cardinal-alt):
choose-one
Choose-one
plain old "first past the post," used in most single winner elections.ranked-irv
Ranked choice IRV
Otherwise known as Hare. This is the method that is used in lots of US cities, Alaska and Maine.
This does not include the Bottom-two runoff variation (which is under ranked choice Condorcet).
assume they are ranked using up to ten ranks, no equal ranks other than for "unranked" which get the lowest rankranked-condorcet
Ranked-choice Condorcet
Otherwise known as ordinal ballot Condorcet.
this includes Bottom Two Runoff, Ranked Robin (Copeland//Borda), and "straight on Condorcet" (Condocet/plurality), MinMax, Ranked Pairs, Schulze
assume they are ranked using up to ten ranks, no equal ranks other than for "unranked" which get the lowest rankcardinal-condorcet
Cardinal ballot Condorcet
Otherwise known as score ballot condorcet.
this includes Copeland//Score (which means elect candidate with most pairwise wins, if a tie, the one with the highest score wins), Smith//Score, and Smith//Normalized Score
assume 6 choices, 0-5
unrated is equal to ranking as a zerostar
STAR
assume 6 choices, 0-5
unrated is equal to ranking as a zeroapproval
Approval votingscore
Score voting (a.k.a. "range")
assume 6 choices, 0-5
unrated is equal to ranking as a zerocardinal-alt
Cardinal ballot: alternative
Includes "stellar" (STLR), which uses a "levelled runoff", and various other reweighted cardinal ballot methods that are not Condorcet compliant
assume 6 choices, 0-5
unrated is equal to ranking as a zerocardinal-median
Cardinal ballot median
This uses a score ballot, and elects the candidate with highest (interpolated) median. Majority Judgement (while differing on some details) falls under this.
assume 6 choices, 0-5
unrated is equal to ranking as a zeroYou'll be able to vote by simply copy/pasting the below, and filling in the values between the brackets. (this will happen in a different thread) Each rating should be between 0 and 10, add as many decimal places as you want. You can give any "approval threshold" you want, the default is 5. I recommend giving each option a rating. Ratings below your approval threshold will not be approved under approval tabulation.
choose-one[] ranked-irv [] ranked-condorcet [] ranked-borda [] cardinal-condorcet [] cardinal-median [] cardinal-alt [] star[] approval[] score[]
approval threshold: 5Random notes:
All condorcet methods are lumped together, with the exception of whether they use cardinal or ordinal ("ranked") ballots. The assumption is that Condorcet methods are highly unlikely to differ in result based on cycle resolution method.
Ranked-robin, according to its Electowiki page, has a specific means of presenting results. For the purposes here, we'll ignore that, since I don't consider that part of the method per se. Majority Judgement has some details (such as using words rather than numbers on the ballot) that also are arguably not part of the method per se, and can be ignored for simplicity.
For median methods, since median is very likely to have a tie, assume an interpolated median or other similar means to avoid ties. http://www.weekscomputing.com/webhelp/hs520.htm
I will use various visualizations on the results. Expect the new "pairwise mesh" for condorcet methods:
and this version of the pairwise matrix:
as well as stuff like this:
....and so on. The amount of effort I'll go to is dependent on how many people vote.
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@rob Looks pretty good.
STLR seems like a bit of an outlier in this group to get its entire own category, but probably doesn't hurt to include.
I think I would make MJ into just "median-based methods" all lumped together, since MJ is a particular way to resolve ties of the median, but there are others (like Bucklin, Usual Judgement, and more)
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I know this isn't the voting thread but I couldn't resist
cc[10] star[9] rc-c[8] appr[7] rc-i[6] mj[3] co[2] score[1] sltr[0]
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@andy-dienes I'll change the name and abbreviation for majority judgement to just be "cardinal median" or the like, so we can treat it more generically.
As for STLR, that's @Keith-Edmonds method... Keith, is this still one you want to promote? It didn't seem to fit neatly into other options.
Glad you're champing at the bit to vote... I went ahead and added mine to my signature, so it's fine to do that, but I want to hold off with the "real" vote until we've decided which options are final.
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@rob Thank you for including STLR. I do still advocate for this system. I think it is better than STAR but I do not think it is viable in the current climate of voting reform for a number of reasons. I favour STAR publicly.
Which class are sequential elimination reweighted systems like Cardinal Baldwin and IRNR? STAR and STLR may be better to be paired as a single auto run-off class.
rc-i[0] rc-c[2] c-c[6] star[9] appr[7] score[9] stlr[10] c-med[3] c-o[1]
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@keith-edmonds said in Proposed options for "voting on voting methods":
Which class are sequential elimination reweighted systems like Cardinal Baldwin and IRNR? STAR and STLR may be better to be paired as a single auto run-off class.
Would you like to decide how to categorize (and abbreviate) those? I'll add them in. I had kind of forgotten about Cardinal Baldwin and am not all that familiar with IRNR.
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@rob I would put them in the same class as STLR and STAR.... I think. They are all directed towards trying to reweight the scores as you eliminate losers.
STAR and STLR do it for the final round while several others do it at each round. The cost of doing it a each round is that you lose monotonicity and there is a fair bit of added complexity. In my mind they all have the same intent so it would be fair to put them together. "reweighted cardinal run-off methods" or something like that would be a reasonable name.
All that said, It would be a shame to lump all such systems of varying quality together with a frontrunner like STAR. Could I propose that commonly used systems like Approval, STAR and IRV stand alone while other systems with no lobby behind them get grouped?
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@keith-edmonds Totally agree on keeping STAR, Approval and IRV separate (only lumping together minor variations of them).
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Great idea! Some thoughts:
I would probably mention that IRV is also known as Alternative Vote. In the UK, we had a referendum on using it for our parliamentary elections, and that was the name it went under.
For ranked-choice Condorcet, for the examples I'd probably include some of the better known methods like ranked pairs or Schulze, so it's clearer at a glance what the category is. Otherwise it might confuse people into thinking it's some esoteric group rather than what it actually is.
For median methods, I would exclude the word "cardinal". As you say, Majority Judgement differs from your description anyway because it uses letter grades rather than cardinal scores but that it falls into this category anyway. I would just make the category wider so that it is included without having to add a caveat.
At the risk of incurring the wrath of @Keith-Edmonds I wouldn't have STLR. As far as I know (and it's possible I'm wrong), it is just his pet method and has gained no wider traction. And if you include that method, then there are dozens of others you could add too. It is also based on what I would consider to be the misguided notion of utility ratios. In any case, it does seem to stick out as the most esoteric method in the list.
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@toby-pereira On the contrary. I agree with all your points and you will get no wrath. I have purposely not attempted to gain traction for STLR since STAR is the better choice for lobbying.
I think it would be best to have a class containing IRNR, Cardinal Baldwin, STLR and other reweighting methods. Brian Olson, Aldo Tragni, myself and some others have put a lot of time into the development of this class. STAR is technically in this class but it is on the edge of it. For that and reasons I mentioned before STAR should stand alone.
While we are on the topic, if you consider the reweighting method of STLR to be misguided then by extension you would also consider cardinal Baldwin to be misguided. Is there a reweighting system which you think if better?
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@keith-edmonds said in Proposed options for "voting on voting methods":
While we are on the topic, if you consider the reweighting method of STLR to be misguided then by extension you would also consider Cardinal Baldwin to be misguided. Is there a reweighting system which you think if better?
If I've understood the methods correctly, then I think Cardinal Baldwin normalises in a different way from STLR and preserves relative score distances (affine transformation I think it's called) rather than ratios.
E.g. if a voter score candidate A 5 and B 4 (out of max 5) and these are the last two remaining candidates, then STLR will leave the scores alone, whereas Cardinal Baldwin will turn them into 5 and 0 respectively.
Whereas if A scores 1 and B 0 (still out of 5), then both methods would normalise to 5 and 0.
I would prefer Cardinal Baldwin's handling of this.
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@toby-pereira OK, makes sense. The one round run off version of that is STAR and the every round run off is Cardinal Baldwin. Presumably you prefer this because it maximizes voter influence. I invented STLR specifically to avoid that as it leads to majoritarianism.
It seems there are (at least) three types. This one. The one STLR uses. And the one for IRNR and Distributed Voting
I propose that these should all be consider them all the same class for this poll. Do you agree? Wanna suggest a name? I gave one above.
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@keith-edmonds said in Proposed options for "voting on voting methods":
I propose that these should all be consider them all the same class for this poll. Do you agree? Wanna suggest a name? I gave one above.
Well in terms of the poll, I think if they were all to be included, some of them might different enough methods to be kept separate, even if they have the similarity of some sort of score normalisation. I think lumping together should only happen if you'd expect basically the same results, and I'm not sure if that's the case with all these methods.
As for the name, I'm not too bothered especially since I'm not invested in these methods, so I wouldn't disagree with your "reweighted cardinal run-off methods". But as I'm here, Cardinal Automatic Run-off methods could be abbreviated to CAR methods!
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What about this.... I'm thinking I should use longer names than the abbreviations I previously suggested (so you can tell what they are without looking them up) but still relatively short so it doesn't make textual ballots too bulky.
I was thinking just "cardinal alt" for ones that aren't condorcet compliant and don't fit into other categories, so cardinal baldwin, STLR, and a few others would be members of the class. If we get enough people voting for them, we should break it down further in future votes.
ranked-irv
ranked-condorcet
ranked-borda
cardinal-condorcet
cardinal-median
cardinal-alt
star
approval
score
choose-one -
@rob I have to say I think I agree with @Keith-Edmonds that STAR should probably be in a class of its own, especially because of its much more prominent presence in voting milieu than other `cardinal-alt' methods.
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@andy-dienes oh my bad I had star in there but somehow lost it while sorting things around. Fixed.
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@rob said in Proposed options for "voting on voting methods":
What about this.... I'm thinking I should use longer names than the abbreviations I previously suggested (so you can tell what they are without looking them up) but still relatively short so it doesn't make textual ballots too bulky.
I was thinking just "cardinal alt" for ones that aren't condorcet compliant and don't fit into other categories, so cardinal baldwin, STLR, and a few others would be members of the class. If we get enough people voting for them, we should break it down further in future votes.
ranked-irv
ranked-condorcet
ranked-borda
cardinal-condorcet
cardinal-median
cardinal-alt
star
approval
score
choose-oneI think longer abbreviations are good. The problem with cardinal-alt is that it would be difficult to know how to score it if you like some that would fall under the category but not others. I would probably only include options that are specific enough so that someone would likely have a similar opinion of all the methods it would cover.
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@toby-pereira Point taken. Just keep in mind that this isn't just going to be a one time vote. If enough people vote for the cardinal-alt to justify it, we can break it down into several for the next vote. Or have a separate vote for "best way to tabulate cardinal ballots?" or something,
Notice that other ones can be broken down further as well. For instance ranked condorcet has various cycle breaker mechanisms, ranked irv can or cannot allow for equal rankings, score can be 0-5 or 0-100, and so on.
Anyway, I remain open to suggestions, but I'd like to keep it around 10-12 options, and account for STLR one way or another (since it is the favorite method of at least one of the top contributors here, and doesn't fit into other categories.).
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There's a category of first-step-eliminations before other main popular methods that I would like as a seperate category or vote in another thread.
As an example I would like to eliminate 35% of the candidates with the lowest (average) scores.
ranked-irv[1] ranked-condorcet[2] ranked-borda[0] cardinal-condorcet[10] cardinal-median[4] cardinal-alt[10] star[6] approval[5] score[4] choose-one[1] minimax-TD[10]
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@multi_system_fan Is there a system that meets this description that has been described/documented in some detail?
