New method (I think?): Hare-squared
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@andy-dienes Thanks, I will read it when I get time. (I have been spending way too much time on this forum recently!)
I'm all into "game theoretical stability", and finding ways to visualize what a "perfect" method would be, even if it is impractical (and unnecessary) to have such methods in the real world. But I find them valuable as an exercise, and hopefully in terms of minimizing some of the ugly back and forth that can happen when discussing things like IRV.
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@rb-j said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
So I'm kinda grumpy. I'm sorry.
We all get grumpy sometimes.
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@rob said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
@rb-j said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
As far as I understand, this is expressed with the maxim "One person, one vote".
Yeah that is a very vague saying. I get the concept, but many people interpret it very literally, such as saying that ranking or approving doesn't qualify simply because they are doing more than checking a single box.
I understand that, and it's essentially where we RCV advocates disagree with detractors who insist on FPTP.
What they don't want to understand is the notion of the Single-Transferable Vote. It's one vote, but it gets shifted around in such a manner that best benefits the political interest of the enfranchised person who is voting. They get only one vote.
The difference between the Hare advocates and the Condorcet folks are that the former says that some of us cannot transfer our vote from our higher-ranked candidate, that was just eliminated, to the contingency candidate of our choosing as expressed on our ballots. The Condorcet advocates say we can. When you promote your product saying *"You can vote for the candidate you really want and need not choose between the lesser of evils. If your favorite candidate cannot win election, then your vote counts for your second choice." Howard Dean (whom I was fortunate enough to introduce to a big crowd in NH in 2004) made that claim ignorant of the fact that it's demonstrated false in the experience of his very own home town.
When you make that claim (which is Property 4 in this), you should mean it.
In order to allow voters to vote their hopes instead of their fears, the election should not punish (or disincentivize) voters from voting their hopes. It does that by actually preventing the spoiler effect (an oft advertized feature of RCV). And it does that by making sure that the majority candidate is elected and not blocked from election because of the spoiler.
I've used the example of people voting for a number (say an office temperature or the amount of monthly dues) and choosing the median, which is as close to everyone having "equal voting power" as anything I can imagine.
The median helps block the effect of exaggeration of one's preference in order to unfairly increase the effect of one's expression of their preference.
But so does One-person-one-vote. Unlike Score Voting or Borda RCV, it doesn't matter if I prefer A enthusiastically and you prefer B only tepidly, your vote for B should count just as much as my vote for A.
The median thing is a mathematical tool to prevent outliers from changing the measure of how the middle of the spectrum affects a composite measured property (like median income vs. mean) or in social choice.
I tend to think Condorcet systems most closely approach that in elections with human candidates and a single winner.
And that cannot be satisfied outside of Majority Rule: If a simple majority of voters agree that Candidate A is a better choice for office than Candidate B, then Candidate B is not elected.
I've never been big on the use of the word "majority" when there are more than two candidates. Especially if combined with the word "support", which seems so artificially binary.
Between two candidates there is an unambiguous notion of majority support if we agree that every voter's expression of support (that's what a vote is) is counted equally.
The fact that there always exists a simple majority between two candidates (unless they tie) is misconstrued by naive (or disingenuous) RCV advocates to claim that RCV is "guaranteed to elect the majority-supported candidate" because it boils the election down to two candidates in the final round, in which there is always a simple majority.
Of course that Hare final-round pair of candidates is not the only way to pair two candidates and examine which one is supported more than the other. Everyone, other than the Condorcet loser, is a "majority candidate".
If I vote for someone over another person, that is no indication that I "like" them in any everyday sense of the word, only that I prefer them over someone else.
That's correct. And that preference of yours counts just as much as my preference for the "someone else". Doesn't matter how much more I prefer my candidate vs. how much you prefer yours. Our votes should count equally.
I agree that Condorcet is best (it seems to meet my idea of "game theoretically stable," which is important to me but not necessarily a priority for others), but I just don't like using the concept of "majority."
Simple majority and Absolute majority have dictionary definitions that are reasonably concise.
And again, I refer back to the "voting for a number" thing.... my vote might pull the vote from 69.2 degrees to 69.3 degrees, when I preferred 72 degrees.
And a good and fair social choice system should not incentize you from expressing your preference in any manner other than sincere. Express your sincere preference and rely on the method to respect your preference, as a person holding equal rights and equal franchise, equally as much as any other person's preference.
That can be perfectly fair and equitable, but the word "majority" doesn't in any way apply.
That's right. And if we were voting for an alternative that is an ordered quantity, Score Voting using median score rather than plurality score, seems very fair and equitable to me. Maybe use this for a public vote on the city's budget cap or tax-base percentile. But not people or maps or discrete alternative plans that are not an ordered quantity. Then the only fair thing is valuing each voter's vote equally.
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@rb-j said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
The fact that there always exists a simple majority between two candidates (unless they tie)
not if voters truncate their rankings
And a good and fair social choice system should not incentize you from expressing your preference in any manner other than sincere
Agreed, and IRV is one of the very best methods at incentivizing sincere rankings. It has other flaws yes, but strategic manipulability is not really one of them.
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@andy-dienes said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
Agreed, and IRV is one of the very best methods at incentivizing sincere rankings
I mostly agree with this, but think there is some very subtle incentive to exaggerate your preferences if there are two clear front runners.
I do find it so weird, though, that IRV-but-not-Condorcet people (FairVote etc) claim that it is a good thing that "IRV rewards those w/ strong 1st choice support” (FairVote's words in response to Jack's tweet about BTR), but they don't seem to get that IF this is true, then it MUST incentivize the exaggeration I described above.
Really doesn't make sense. My goal is to find a way of demonstrating this that is so obvious to regular people that they stop making that dumb argument. I really think they have an opportunity to shift their position slightly without just declaring they were wrong about everything and go home, which obviously they aren't going to do.
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@andy-dienes said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
@rb-j said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
The fact that there always exists a simple majority between two candidates (unless they tie)
not if voters truncate their rankings
Which is why I advocate that ballot access law be strong enough so that there aren't more than 5 or 6 candidates who are on the ballot. But if there are, say, a dozen candidates one the ballot, there should be at least 5 or 6 ranking levels. And if there are more ranking levels, then precincts should algorithmically choose the 5 or 6 leading candidates in that precinct, and publish pairwise defeats for the pairings of the top 5 or 6. Precinct summability does not mean that the paper tape printout of summable tallies is 10 feet long. It has to be practical, feasible. 20 or 30 summable tallies is about that practical limit.
And a good and fair social choice system should not incentize you from expressing your preference in any manner other than sincere
Agreed, and IRV is one of the very best methods at incentivizing sincere rankings.
But it's not the best, is it? And it's not about the ranked ballots but are about the rules of the game, which can be fairly and safely examined. And courageously examined.
It has other flaws yes, but strategic manipulability is not really one of them.
The point is 1510 voters (out of 8976) found out that, merely by voting for their favorite candidate, they actually caused the election of their least-favorite candidate. Just like Nader voters that got W elected, that incentivizes these voters to vote for the major party candidate that is best situated to beat the candidate that they loathe.
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@rb-j said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
that incentivizes these voters to vote for the major party candidate that is best situated to beat the candidate that they loathe.
I had hoped that it would be obvious at this point that I am familiar with the phenomenon of Center Squeeze.
I am aware that it happens, but it is hard to predict and is a risky strategy for those who attempt it.
For many, many references to academic literature where this question is studied (and concludes that IRV is difficult to manipulate) please see my comment here
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@andy-dienes this is not just about Center-Squeeze. This is more general than that.
It's about "Vote your hopes, not your fears."
Center-Squeeze was just a way for RCV to violate that promise.
But FPTP also does. I just want you to admit that this promise we RCV advocates make, saying why RCV is better than FPTP, was actually violated by Hare RCV in no uncertain terms (because we have possession of the ranked-ballot data and know who the contingency choices were). At least with FPTP we have to speculate that the election was spoiled. Ain't no speculation with RCV and public records.
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@rb-j said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
The point is 1510 voters (out of 8976) found out that, merely by voting for their favorite candidate, they actually caused the election of their least-favorite candidate
An important question is whether they could have known. Because after the fact seeing that you could have done something different is a bit different than, at the time of voting, having a clear insincere strategy.
I know @Andy-Dienes would like to stop discussing Burlington, and I have mixed feelings on that. I do think making it out to be a complete disaster is overstating it. To me it was an example of "the Hare effect" being not applied strongly enough to best deal with that very close election, which was a 1/340 situation.
What I will continue to do (and am doing now) is testing various minor alterations of Hare (bottom-2 runoff, of course, but also others) against Burlington ballots.
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@rob said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
@rb-j said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
The point is 1510 voters (out of 8976) found out that, merely by voting for their favorite candidate, they actually caused the election of their least-favorite candidate
An important question is whether they could have known.
You collectively learn that with a history of usage and with spoiled elections. I don't wanna wait for another spoiled election to happen in order to start noticing.
Because after the fact seeing that you could have done something different is a bit different than, at the time of voting, having a clear insincere strategy.
But that's always the case with spoiled elections. It's after the election is spoiled that voters learn that maybe they shoulda voted their fears instead of their hopes. From the paper:
When an election is apparently spoiled, many of the voters who voted for the ostensible spoiler suffer voter regret for their choice when they learn of the outcome of the election and they realize that they aided the candidate they preferred least to win by “throwing away their vote” or “wasting their vote” on their favorite candidate rather than voting for the candidate best situated to beat their least-preferred candidate.
This leads to tactical voting in future elections, where the voting tactic is called “compromising”. This tactical voting is not a nefarious strategy to throw or game an election but is an undesired burden that minor party and independent voters carry, which pressures them to vote for the major party candidate that they dislike the least. They are voting their fears and not their hopes and this has the effect of advantaging the two major parties. This reflects “Duverger’s Law” which states that plurality rule (First-Past-The-Post or FPTP) elections, with the traditional mark-only-one ballots, promote a twoparty political system, and third party or independent candidates will not have a level playing field in such elections. Voters who want to vote for these third party or independent candidates are discouraged from doing so, out of fear of helping elect the major party candidate they dislike the most.
I know @Andy-Dienes would like to stop discussing Burlington, and I have mixed feelings on that. I do think making it out to be a complete disaster is overstating it. To me it was an example of "the Hare effect" being not applied strongly enough to best deal with that very close election, which was a 1/340 situation.
What I will continue to do (and am doing now) is testing various minor alterations of Hare (bottom-2 runoff, of course, but also others) against Burlington ballots.
Why bother? Why not just solve the problem with simple Condorcet? Or with BTR?
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@rb-j said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
Why not just solve the problem with simple Condorcet? Or with BTR?
Those would be great. I don't think anyone (of us) is arguing that a Condorcet check doesn't improve a method. It does.
But it's not productive to rail against IRV. It's better than FPTP.
My approval set of election reforms is { LiterallyAnythingProportional, LiterallyAnythingConcorcet, Approval, STAR, IRV }
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@andy-dienes said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
@rb-j said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
Why not just solve the problem with simple Condorcet? Or with BTR?
Those would be great. I don't think anyone (of us) is arguing that a Condorcet check doesn't improve a method. It does.
But it's not productive to rail against IRV.
Yes, it is. The correct time to rail is right now, with the experience in Vermont and now with the newly experienced difficulties of Maine and NYC with administering RCV elections and getting timely results.
Now is the time to be learning object lessons while the objects remain visibly presented. We need to learn from failures, rather than ignoring or denying (or forgetting) the failures. That's not how you learn from failure.
It's better than FPTP.
So what? FPTP is better than Autocracy. Or sortition. Big fat hairy deeel.
My approval set of election reforms is { LiterallyAnythingProportional, LiterallyAnythingConcorcet, Approval, STAR, IRV }
I'm trying to get some reform done and not damage the cause by ignoring, denying, or forgetting failure of the reform we advocate.
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@rb-j said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
Yes, it is. The correct time to rail is right now,
Obviously some of us disagree with this approach. Myself, strongly so. I think that approach by many people within the community has driven away a lot of people. Probably a lot are like "wait, you guys are proposing better ways to come to group decisions, and yet you are some of the most abrasive and argumentative people I've seen on the web? If you can't agree on anything, why should we trust you to help the rest of us? I mean, seriously, WTF? kthxbai."
The EndFPTP forum actually has a rule, don't bash alternatives to choose-one. I am considering proposing we do the same here.
I'm trying to get some reform done and not damage the cause by ignoring, denying, or forgetting failure of the reform we advocate.
There's other ways to "damage the cause." Did you maybe hire a marketing consultant, and they advised you that "abrasively strident" was the way to open people's minds and win them to your side? Cuz I'm saying you should fire them now, because they suck at their jobs.
It seems like you are purposefully trying to get people to dislike interacting with you, and to therefore reject your message. I don't mean this as a personal attack, just something I wish you were more aware of. I'm confident it's going to get you banned if you keep it up here. It's a small forum, so maybe it doesn't matter to you, but still. Seems like you have had similar issues at EndFPTP. I honestly don't get why you'd think anything positive would come from your approach.
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@rb-j said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
So what? FPTP is better than Autocracy. Or sortition. Big fat hairy deeel.
yes, some things are better than others, and FPTP is not at the very bottom of the chain. To be honest I'm struggling to see why this seems to be so hard to understand.
Autocracy << [bad voting methods like Borda or Veto] < FPTP << [better voting methods like IRV or approval] < [possibly even better better methods like fancy Condorcet ones] << [proportional representation]
I am trying to say "look, IRV is ranked 3rd here which is better than FPTP, ranked 4th." You are replying "but actually FPTP is even better than those things ranked 5th." Which, like, yes it is? But so what?
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@rb-j said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
Yes, it is. The correct time to rail is right now, with the experience in Vermont and now with the newly experienced difficulties of Maine and NYC with administering RCV elections and getting timely results.
Let's rail, but let's rail on valid grounds only, lest we attract a reputation for disingenuous propaganda. Before the first successful powered flight by humans extended with machines, all prior efforts had failed. Eventually craft work and/or engineering advanced sufficiently to overcome the problems and reach the goal. Just because NYC flubbed up with administering RCV IRV Hare, doesn't mean a method of administering it that works better couldn't be engineered. Rob is saying let the precincts publish over the Internet the counts of all the ballot types cast there. Then anyone with a computer and a little knowledge of how to use it could reproduce the tally, and it would not take days (maybe it would take me days, but lots of others would do it in two hours and that includes research and reverse engineering the format and writing scripts).
