Simple anti-chicken modifications to score
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STAR has been extremely divisive on the EM-list. Lots of people have some very harsh things to say about it. This wasn't just the usual jockeying from perfectionists, and I think I've come around to the other EM-listers on this. The opposition to STAR seems to be common to both cardinal and Condorcet supporters. Everyone seems to agree either Smith//Score or plain Score would be better than STAR.
Most of these criticisms boil down to STAR managing to break every criterion in the book. Adding a runoff destroys favorite betrayal, later-no-help, participation, . It does this in to try and prevent a strategic voting dilemma that:
- Has never been observed in an actual election (and is even named after an election where it notably didn't happen),
- Is probably rare,
- Would incentivize party elites to clear the field in the first place to avoid this, and
- Seems almost impossible to accomplish without any other candidate noticing and retaliating.
Personally, I was supportive of STAR until @SaraWolk's comment about the possibility of candidates not running in cloned pairs made me think through its potential turkey-raising problems. Burt Monroe has argued (very convincingly, in my opinion) that any system that fails turkey-raising will eventually be repealed. It doesn't matter that the expected value of a strategy is negative: empirically, parties push turkey-raising strategies even in systems where risks of blowback are extremely strong, e.g. the Democratic party's support for extreme Republican nominees in primaries, or their refusal to put up an alternative to Gavin Newsom in the recall.
It's true that criteria are worst-case guarantees, and what we care about is the average case. But for something as complex as a political system, we don't know the average case. Simulations are unrealistic and we've never run elections with STAR. All we know is in the worst case, STAR might do very badly.
If nothing else, these dramatic criteria failures severely limit the possibility of receiving endorsements from economists and social choice theorists. Few, if any, voting theorists who hear about STAR's criteria failures are eager to endorse it.
This leads me to suggest the following alternatives to STAR in its current form, which attempt to eliminate the small (but potentially disastrous) risk of turkey-raising.
- Provide a small reward to ballots that rate multiple candidates above 0. D2.1 does this by granting a single antiplurality vote to voters who give multiple approvals. A full antiplurality vote sounds too strong, but maybe something else would improve on it, e.g. down-weighting bullet votes to give only 4 stars to the favorite instead of 5?
- Using trimmed-means instead of the average rating.
- Smith//Score and Score DSV both received strong praise on the EM list as alternatives to STAR, especially if combined with a tied-at-the-top rule.
- Limit STAR runoffs to allied candidates (described elsewhere).
- Limit STAR runoffs to candidates who have strong mutual support (i.e. actual chickens or clones). For example, the runoff could consist of the score winner, paired against the candidate whose score is most positively correlated with the score winner's (across ballots).
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@lime Assertions that strategic voting incentives are not important but that the 100% passage of mutually exclusive criteria (in which it's agreed that all are important but passing them all is impossible) is required, are wildly out of touch and outdated.
More likely they are linked to the RCV lobby's campaign to sabotage STAR Voting for Eugene, Measure 20-349, which people start voting on this week. (see pgs 9-26)
Getting a 99% on a criteria like Favorite Betrayal is not a "dramatic criteria failure". Balancing mutually exclusive criteria like FB and LNH is common sense.
In STAR, in practice, a voter should give their favorite 5 stars, their last choice 0, and show their full honest preference order between the candidates who are at all relevant. In order to argue otherwise a faction would need impossible polling data in near tie scenarios.
Arguments like these are the reason voting reform is still in the dark ages.
The argument that many prefer Smith//Score (good luck with that level of complexity in the real world) or plain Score goes to show that the war between ordinal and cardinal methods is still alive and well.
When will we stop ignoring the forest for the trees and recognize that both have important pieces of the puzzle and that a hybrid approach like STAR makes more sense than telling people that their concerns are invalid.
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I don't think that reply addressed any of my concerns. I'm worried about STAR's potential for turkey-raising. It's completely possible that STAR is great at avoiding favorite-betrayal, reduces the rate of LNH violations, and does lots of other good things, but is still vulnerable to turkey-raising (later-no-help violations).
@sarawolk said in Simple anti-chicken modifications to score:
When will we stop ignoring the forest for the trees and recognize that both have important pieces of the puzzle and that a hybrid approach like STAR makes more sense than telling people that their concerns are invalid.
Smith//Score is a hybrid approach just like STAR, by the way, and I offered several other hybrid approaches that could improve on STAR in my post.
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@sarawolk said in Simple anti-chicken modifications to score:
More likely they are linked to the RCV lobby's campaign to sabotage STAR Voting for Eugene, Measure 20-349, which people start voting on this week.
Does the RCV lobby you speak of include Unite America and/or the Independent Voter Project and other Top Four & Final Five proponents?
I wrote an article about Final Four & Final Five for an upcoming website. My take was "A Few Flaws, but Much Better than the Status Quo".
I did discuss the Peltola, Begish, Palin and Claus election, but I resisted the temptation to use the term "WUCs" Wealthy Unaffiliated Candidates.
Was I too nice?
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@gregw Yes. Unite Oregon is listed as a top donor for NextUP and NextUP is listed as the top donor on the anti-STAR mailer that just dropped in people's mailboxes yesterday. They are also doing anti-STAR Voting robocalls to voters.
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@sarawolk said in Simple anti-chicken modifications to score:
Unite Oregon is listed as a top donor for NextUP and NextUP is listed as the top donor on the anti-STAR mailer that just dropped in people's mailboxes yesterday. They are also doing anti-STAR Voting robocalls to voters.
From my Top Four Final Five Article:
The Purpose of Top Four and Top Five Elections
Unite America is the leading proponent of “Top Four Primaries”. From their website: “Unite America is a philanthropic venture fund that invests in nonpartisan election reform to foster a more representative and functional government.”
Unite America was founded in 2014 as the Centrist Project. According to founding board member and current Executive Director, Nick Troiano “It sought to elect a handful of independent Senate candidates who could form a “fulcrum” to control the balance of power and leverage their influence to advance bipartisan solutions.”
This explains the advantages for independent candidates. (I previously mentioned the listing of each candidate's voter registration, but not party nominations on the RCV ballots, which helps independent candidates by confusing party supporters.) It is also a brilliant political strategy. A small coalition of unaffiliated candidates gains great power without the bother of forming a political party. Be very careful about which independent candidates you vote for.
They are using RCV in an effort to elect centrist candidates. Could it be that they are using RCV because they think it will fail in their favor?
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@sarawolk said in Simple anti-chicken modifications to score:
More likely they are linked to the RCV lobby's campaign to sabotage STAR Voting for Eugene, Measure 20-349, which people start voting on this week. (see pgs 9-26)
I promise you that nobody in the election-methods mailing list is particularly positive on IRV.
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@lime said in Simple anti-chicken modifications to score:
I promise you that nobody in the election-methods mailing list is particularly positive on IRV.
Yes, I have noticed that.
Most of the support for IRV is from the Alaskan model (Top Four & Final Five) proponents and their ally Fair Vote.
Fair Vote is promoting Proportional Racked Choice Voting in the Fair Representation Act (Rep. Donald Beyer, D-VA-8).
The Fair Representation Act (FRA) calls for Ranked Proportional Voting (SVT), FairVote claims:
"It’s straightforward for voters: Rank candidates in order of choice. Voters can rank as many candidates as they want, without fear that doing so will hurt their favorite candidate’s chances. Ranking a backup choice will never hurt a voter’s favorite candidate, so voters have no reason to vote for only one candidate."
This year's version of the FRA includes provisions for states with blanket primaries.
As with previous versions, FRA protects Voting Right Act of 1965 set aside districts. Frankly I think fair voting systems, especially proportional representation, will help minorities far more than set aside districts. Set aside districts are perceived by Republicans as a perfectly legitimate excuse to gerrymander like all hell.
The FairVote FRA pages give the impression the the chief purpose of proportional representation is to get more people of color, women, LGBTQ candidates elected.
To get Proportional Representation enacted we will need support from a good number of conservatives and Republicans. We should sell voting system reforms as color blind (they are), and fair. They will help minority representation by virtue of being color blind.
The FRA is now in committee, the speaker will decide when to let it out of committee, smart money is on never.
