Posts made by cfrank

@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)

@arturomacias there is a lot to unpack here. It may be more conducive for discussion if the points are separated into parallel threads.

I will just say that I strongly disagree with this assertion: “…a political system is not legitimate because of the consent of the governed, but because of the welfare of the governed. A political system [is] a mechanism that collect[s] information about preferences and facts and turn[s] them into decisions.”

@casimir again this is just a criticism of the law and the judgment made about it: I still think even their reasoning (in bold) is pretty absurd. It means essentially that any system whatsoever that gets put into use is automatically constitutional, regardless of any negative or unexpected consequences, even those that directly contradict the letter of the law So what is the point of the law? It seems only to prevent the use of unconstitutionality to enact technical voting reform.

@casimir yes I didn’t think you were defending the judgment or the system. I was just criticizing both lol.

@casimir interesting, I will not contend the law per se, since the law is the law. However, it can be argued very reasonably that non-monotonicity is something that is never actually an “expected” outcome from a ballot on the behalf of any rational, faithful voter.

In fact, it is directly contrary to any reasonable notion of the “expected” outcome of a ballot cast by a voter. Expectations should never be contrary to the desired consequence of the ballot that is submitted, yes? Otherwise that defeats the purpose of submitting the ballot—a rational person will not submit a ballot they expect to backfire against its intended consequence. So I really doubt that under sufficient scrutiny, any non-monotonic system would actually stand up to the phrasing of the law.

Whether or not they are unconstitutional in Germany or elsewhere, I do believe that any voting system that is not monotonic or that fails independence of clones should be considered fully improper and disqualified from being part of any official public elections. I.e. they should by all reason be illegal in that context. And perhaps actually are in spirit or will be found formally illegal in Germany.

Honestly, it’s this kind of thing that shows the need for a clear, mathematical ontology of voting systems. Words like “expected” and “secretive” and “direct” are way too vague. Voting theory is a technical field and laws about it should use the technical language of the field.

@wolftune @GregW same, I can’t click the link

@wolftune this is a well-known Condorcet method due in spirit to Tideman and called “Bottom N Runoff” where N=2 (hence “Bottom Two Runoff,” I.e. BTR or B2R). Generally speaking, these methods use some kind of absolute criterion (like least number of first place votes, lowest score, lowest approval, etc.) to decide which “bottom” candidates to subject to an elimination round, eliminates a Condorcet loser among them, and iterates until the desired number of winners remain. You are right, they’re pretty good methods. I like them.

@bmjacobs absolutely, the problem is mainly public perception. Probably at some point if more accessible reforms are made, public awareness will gravitate to more sophisticated solutions.

@bmjacobs my intuition is that it will take a lot of education to convince the mainstream public that nondeterminism is a viable solution to certain voting theoretical problems. Putting that aside, what would your position be regarding auditing and transparency for a nondeterministic system, and whether this kind of system could be feasibly implemented without worries about rigging?

@k98kurz it’s really great you’re working on these kinds of reinforcement learning methods in this field, definitely something both very interesting and that can give us insight into how these systems work. Looking forward to hearing about any of the work in this area!

The title says it all.

@casimir sure that makes some sense, but it also seems peculiar. STAR would double the number of candidates running, making it more difficult for voters to come to an informed understanding of the platforms of those candidates. At the same time, it would introduce a competition between the top two candidates for any party throughout the election, and who knows what kind of insanity that might induce: "We're both great, but I'm better" seems like an odd conflict to me. Or it could even be a good thing but it isn't clear.

Anyway, that's probably a conversation for a different thread, but essentially why I don't support STAR. I think BNR-score or BNR-approval would be preferable.

@casimir hmm I think it’s interesting as a system from the standpoint of tactical voting when nominations aren’t “adversarial,” but I worry how robust it is against strategic nominations—if parties nominate two clone candidates at a time, then it basically just becomes score with an added inefficiency. And I think score itself is fine, why not just do score? Parties are virtually guaranteed to engage in strategic nominations, because they already do right now.

@ex-dente-leonem 3x better than what we got so that’s great! Typically how many dimensions are used for candidate platforms in these kinds of simulations?