Posts made by cfrank

@toby-pereira that’s a great point. But say that were an “abstain” option. Then being compelled to enter a voting booth may put a person who would only have cast a nontrivial ballot if convenient into a position where they’re likely to cast that ballot anyway, because the inconvenience becomes a sunk cost.

In that instance, participation in the social sense would be compulsory, but not in the formal sense. At the same time, it makes the choice to abstain a more directly interpretable act of protest. In principle, abstain options could even include rationale. If abstaining were still formally allowed, I’m not sure I would find it unappealing if showing up to vote (or submitting a mail-in ballot) were like filing taxes.

As many of you may know, Australia has implemented compulsory voting. This measure dramatically increased voter turnout and appears to have improved representation for less affluent citizens. It also obviously had influence on policy.

My first instinct was that compulsory voting violates individual expressive freedom and political choice, and may be impractical. If an electoral system is ineffective or corrupt, coerced participation removes abstention as a form of political refusal and institutional rejection.

However, I think it is better to understand the evidence and the actual tradeoffs involved. I am wondering whether, and to what extent, compulsory voting addresses concerns about representation, justice, and effective government compared with voluntary voting.

Does anybody have a more refined understanding of its implications?

Hi @Jan—sounds fun

Since there are only five of you, I would not necessarily over-optimize the voting method. The harder problem is probably not the final vote, but reducing a large game list into a manageable and legible shortlist.

For choosing which games to bring, I would start with a simple structured survey. For each game, collect a few pieces of information, such as owner(s), expected duration, genre, who already knows it, who wants to play it, and maybe a 0–5 interest score from each person.

Then I would use that information to filter the list before doing any final selection. For example, remove games with very low total interest, games that are too long or too short for the trip, games too many people strongly dislike, or games that duplicate the same niche unless several people want them. If you can define those niches, you could even rank the games in each niche to help with pruning.

Since you want each person to bring the same number of games, you could then choose the top-rated games within each owner’s collection, with some manual adjustment to avoid too much overlap. Once you have a proposed list, you could also let the group ratify it before finalizing, using a simple majority or supermajority vote (or better yet, unanimous consensus), with room for minor adjustments.

For deciding what to play once you are there, I’d use something simple: score voting, approval voting, or even “everyone rates their current interest from 0–5, play the highest total unless there is an obvious objection.” Because the group is small and friendly, post-vote discussion is still cheap and probably useful. In the off-chance there’s a stalemate or something, you could have a fallback voting method.

In other words, I would use voting to organize preferences and as a fallback, not to replace conversation and negotiation. A formal voting method matters much more when the electorate is large, strategic, or anonymous, i.e. when collective conversation is inefficient or unproductive. For five friends, a transparent scoring/filtering process plus ordinary negotiation is probably better than a complicated multiwinner rule, in my opinion.

Still, using a voting system and seeing how things shake out can be fun in itself. So if you do want to go down that route, I’m sure others here would be able to offer interesting suggestions, especially on the PR front. And if you proceed with any voting systems, it would be interesting to hear about how you decided to manage the selection and any of the results!

@jack-waugh I'd like to find an explicit example eventually if possible. I haven't fully formalized the criterion as I imagine it yet. In terms of the loose "mere existence" criterion, there are definitely examples, since the modification can be applied to any voting system, and if you consider any voting system non-additive, then we can use that one.
For the updated concept, I think both the concept itself and the concept of what it means for a system to be additive need improved formalization. Do you think you can suggest what it means for a system to be additive mathematically?

@jack-waugh I was reflecting on the balance criterion, and considered a direction for formalization of it that might protect against the adversarial construct I described some years ago.

The idea is to enforce not just existence of “opposite” ballots, which can be too weak, but to demand something like, “There is a public, computationally-tractable ‘reversal’ operation on ballots, induced by the ballot semantics (in some way…), such that every ballot and its reversal cancel under the outcome rule.”

Certain symmetry operations such as permuting/relabeling candidates should commute with the reversal. The above would prohibit the “password attack” mechanism I described, because the ballot reversal operation in that case is neither public nor generally computable.

I’m refraining from demanding additivity in the score-like sense to see whether the property of direct interest can be formalized in some way without it.

Just food for thought.

@robla that's a fair point, thank you for your response. In terms of the two-stage aspect in the US, I feel it is more of a de facto party-driven apparatus on top of the actual formal system, in contrast to France for instance where the two stages are the formally recognized method. You're probably also right that ranking more than a handful of candidates is generally pretty unpleasant. In any case I could be wrong about the difficulty of the sell, which would be good.

Approval top-two primary seems like it might be a decent option for single winner, although I figure it doesn't satisfy clone independence, which is pretty unfortunate.
For the fixed approval threshold, you're suggesting that if no candidate obtains the threshold, then the top two proceed?

"...under such a system, they might hire large analytics teams to ensure that both parties advance a sea of clones to drown out the other parties." Yes, exactly.
I was also thinking if there is a threshold, 50% should be imposed, since that guarantees some weak level of majoritarianism which seems important and that ordinary approval can lack.

In terms of single-winner, I'm on board with 50% approval threshold followed by a final round approval. I think that's really simple and seems to solve many problems.
In principle, it even could let people be lazy and not even bother with the second round if they decide that their first approval ballot is satisfactory enough for them.

Youtube Video

Proportional representation in districts, elimination of partisan gerrymandering, and rank-based voting were mentioned.

https://apnews.com/article/fargo-north-dakota-voting-democracy-bdda17efb891a5f910423394d554c41e

Status quo arguments need to be dismantled.

For example, the argument by Rep. Koppelman (R) is that approval voting produces “vanilla” winners. As in, he argues that polarizing or more ideologically extreme candidates (his word was “principled”) are preferable. To whom? And by what measure? Laid bare: therefore, cities should not even be allowed to vote using anything other than (ostensibly?) a polarizing system like choose-one. Koppelman and others making this kind of argument must be pressed to define exactly what they mean by “principled.”

This is not a neutral administrative argument. It is a value judgment imposed upon the voters of Fargo by their state lawmakers, despite Fargo voters having adopted approval voting by ballot initiative, and despite that voluntary change having no impact whatsoever on any other districts.

Taken seriously, this argument treats broad voter acceptability as a defect rather than a democratic virtue. But suppose even this were true—still, approval voting does not prevent voters from approving a polarizing candidate. What it prevents is a polarizing factional candidate winning merely because the rest of the electorate is split among more broadly acceptable alternatives.

Apparently, some supporters of the ban even stated that approval voting was “confusing.” This cannot be taken as a serious objection in context: the basic instruction is simply to vote for every candidate one approves of, and the count is simple addition.

The remaining argument is state uniformity. Gov. Armstrong (R) later stated, arguing against approval voting in Fargo:

• “Now more than ever, we need a consistent, efficient and easy-to-understand voter experience across our entire state to maintain trust in our election system.”

This does not actually show approval voting is inefficient or hard to understand. Approval voting is counted by simple addition, and its basic instruction is straightforward. The only remaining argument is statewide uniformity. But that is an insufficient justification when the local variation is voter-approved and affects no other jurisdiction. Uniformity is not a self-justifying principle. The purported function of uniformity must be interrogated.

The stated concerns for voter experience and trust are especially hollow, as they were used to nullify a voting system Fargo voters adopted for themselves.

These arguments are not neutral logical objections. They are contemptible rationalizations for state preemption: “uniformity” used to nullify local democracy, “confusion” asserted against one of the simplest possible voting rules, and “principled candidates” used as a euphemism for protecting factional advantage. State representatives should not be able to unjustly override a voter-approved local election system while disguising factional preferences as neutral administrative concerns.

@toby-pereira could be “choose however many” but that doesn’t roll off the tongue per se.

@wolftune that's reasonable, I think the "approval" ("choose-any") community would have to converge on that but it's worth pushing. All the nomenclature we use should definitely be standardized.

This post may be outside the scope of this forum, but I wanted to see what others thought. If this is derailing, let me know, and I’ll consider removing it.

I had two ideas targeted to address abuses of presidential power in the form of pardons and court packing.

Suggestion for judicial appointments: In the event a Supreme Court justice dies or resigns, or a new seat is added, the current sitting president should be allowed only to fill the vacancy until the following presidential election. Lifetime appointments should only be made for seats that were vacated during the previous presidential term.

Suggestion for pardons: Presidents should be allowed to initiate clemency for federal crimes, and the clemency will be probationally enacted until the subsequent president opts in to finalize clemency. Clemency that fails to be approved by the subsequent president by the end of their term will be voided. This preserves the immediacy of pardons while disabling unchecked permanent clemency. At worst, abuses of clemency would be unchecked only until the end of a president’s term.

Obviously, each would require a Constitutional Amendment.

Food for thought.

@poppeacock a Condorcet method is defined in terms of the notion of a “Condorcet winner”, which is a candidate that beats every other candidate in a majoritarian head-to-head match up, also called a “beats all” winner. There can be at most one Condorcet winner in an election; however, there are pathological cases when a Condorcet winner does not exist at all, caused by what are known as Condorcet cycles.

The classic example is three voters using rank ballots over three candidates:

V1: A>B>C
V2: B>C>A
V3: C>A>B

You can see that A>B 2:1, B>C 2:1, but C>A 2:1. So A>B>C>A is a Condorcet cycle, which is a generalized “rock-paper-scissors” situation. Whichever candidate you choose as the winner, there is some majority of the voters who would have preferred a different candidate. That’s the unfortunate thing that happens when a Condorcet winner doesn’t exist…

Regardless, a Condorcet method is any method that guarantees electing the Condorcet winner when one exists. Condorcet methods differ in how they reconcile choosing a winner when the Condorcet winner does not exist, I.e. in effect how they determine which majority group(s) to jilt.

So for example, if Ranked Robin doesn’t specify how it resolves when there is no Condorcet winner, then it’s really a blanket term for Condorcet methods in general. Or maybe it’s a label for a particular curated subset of Condorcet methods.

There are many Condorcet methods, including Ranked Pairs, Schulze’s method, Copeland’s method, Minimax, and Bottom-Two-Runoff (by Tideman).

I like Bottom-Two-Runoff because it’s efficient and also equivalent to a seemingly (but not actually) more robust system: https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/564/bottom-n-and-bottom-2-runoffs-are-equivalent

@poppeacock I see, so the site is using “Ranked Robin” as the umbrella term for any Condorcet method?

@jack-waugh I agree, PR is probably preferable in many ways to alternatives. Still, I think we’re too entrenched in the way our current system works and it may be most effective to start by modifying single-winner systems, specifically transitioning from choose-one plurality to approval plurality.

@poppeacock yes it seems to be a rebranding of Ranked Robin; from your link:

“Carmen won the most match-ups against other candidates, so she is elected the winner.”

I do notice often that these pro- rank-based voting sites almost never address the issues with reconciling the possible nonexistence of a Condorcet winner.

Is the main advantage of Ranked Robin over other Condorcet methods that it is precinct summable?

@jack-waugh it definitely conforms to Frohnmeyer balance, what is Shentrup balance?

Unfortunately it fails participation as any Condorcet method must. I think Condorcet is also incompatible with favorite betrayal, that may need checking.

@sarawolk I can envision a natural progression as: (1) implement straight approval, (2) eventually indicate the shortcomings of approval in guaranteeing election of Smith set candidates, (3) reform to include a ranked primaries to restrict to the Smith set before the final approval vote.

I agree it is not feasible to implement the kind of change needed for the mentioned kind of system all at once.

If approval were established somehow, the (rational, IMO) debate relevant to (2) and (3) would probably be about majoritarianism versus participation and maybe some tactical considerations.

Your point about tie-breaking is fair. For example, why not use Bucklin voting restricted to the Smith set, adjusting ranks to include only those candidates, which is similar to your suggestion. One major reason in that specific case is because it fails independence of clones.

I’m not necessarily just after a simple tie breaker. My concern is with reconciling majority cycles, which can destabilize the system. Something like approval in a second round enables the competing majorities to compromise more directly with full information. Otherwise a true majority may feel jilted by an arbitrary tie breaking rule.

Two-stage voting systems seem like a hard sell in the USA. However, I think a two-stage system is an extremely natural way to satisfy principles of majority rule and self governance.

My opinion is that an ideal single-winner system consists of a first round (or primary) of rank-based voting. If there is a Condorcet winner, no second round is needed. This can be decided easily by a run of B2R and checking if the winner is Condorcet.

Otherwise, the Smith set can be computed and made public. Once known, a second round of approval voting can be run over the Smith set.

Does this have any objectionable properties other than requiring two rounds of voting?