Posts made by cfrank

@toby-pereira makes sense, it seems Condorcet/Smith methods consistently rise to the top in multiple ways.

I think Smith//STAR (implicit) as mentioned above has some problems, but I think Smith//Approval (explicit) as denoted in the electorama vote is a very good method despite taking two rounds. I’m half surprised Smith//Approval (implicit) didn’t do better.

I understand the general aversion to two-stage methods, but in the USA, we often effectively do that with primaries anyway, and it seems commonly used elsewhere. I think introducing alternative methods into party primaries could be pretty significant change in itself.

@masiarek I think this is a useful way of looking at it: sincere, consistent voting should lead to Smith//Approval, as long as the Approval (or score) round is conducted after the Smith set is already known. So I would push back somewhat on “same winner, no second election,” because in SSVV, the Smith set (as well as the Score winner set) is known before the scoring of candidates in step (2.2). That sequencing can matter, even if sincere voting ultimately produces the same outcome as Smith//Approval, unless voters have genuine independent approvals per candidate.

In fact, it may be that most strategic benefits of SSVV are caused by the score/approval in the Smith set being informed by the Smith set itself, which would mean Smith//Smith-informed-Approval is a reasonable comparator, and it may be superior.

I also agree that in the singleton case with sincere voters, the validation step is redundant. If the Score set is ({A}) and the Smith set is ({B}), then a majority vote consistently with sincere preferences should choose the Smith set, since that same majority sincerely prefers (B) to (A). Probably, often the Score winner and Condorcet winner will coincide anyway.

Where I think SSVV differs most substantially from Smith//Approval is in strategic behavior rather than sincere outcomes, particularly when strategic voting changes the composition of the reported Smith set. Smith methods like Smith//Approval automatically commit the electorate to choosing from the reported Smith set, whereas SSVV does not—since voters first see the Score and Smith sets, the majority can decide whether they actually want to validate a Smith set that may have been distorted by tactical voting.

That may matter specifically for burial. Suppose burial changes the Smith set from something relatively compelling into a larger or stranger set. The burial strategy has succeeded in manipulating the pairwise structure, but has also changed the object voters are being asked to validate. Voters who prefer the Score winner to every member of the Smith set obviously choose Score, but even some voters who prefer one Smith candidate to the Score winner might choose Score rather than risk one of the other Smith candidates winning.

So I think your observation points toward an interesting strategic question about the method. Manufacturing a cycle can indeed get a candidate into the Smith set or remove another candidate from it, but unlike under Smith//Approval, that does not automatically get the preferred candidate into the decisive election, nor does it necessarily eliminate the buried candidate from consideration altogether, since the manipulated Smith set has to survive validation by majority vote.

I don’t know yet whether that additional hurdle is strong enough to make enough of a difference to warrant it, but I think that’s the main distinction from Smith//Approval.

My simulations so far have been exploratory and conducted interactively through ChatGPT 5.6-Sol, using spatial and nonspatial electorates with coordinated factions iteratively trying various score-compression, compromise, and burial strategies, so I would not treat them as an equilibrium analysis. They do suggest that the validation stage can sometimes neutralize successful manipulation of the Smith set (primarily accomplished through burial), but that result needs more systematic investigation.

I also just experimented with public B and hidden A, or revealing only the mean score of A rather than candidate identity. This mostly improved behavior even more, because manipulating the Smith set becomes more risky in validation if the Score winner set is kept hidden. But it opens a can of worms in terms of “information engineering” to improve incentives. Even if the Score “escape hatch” isn’t used, its mere existence changes strategic incentives.

This is a single-winner system with two voting stages. I did some cursory simulations against related alternatives, and this looked like the most promising of them.

Definition

(1.1) Voters submit a rank-score ballot: candidates are scored, with the induced score ordering determining the ranking; candidates receiving equal scores may be explicitly ranked to break the ordinal tie.

From (1.1), compute:

• A, the Score winner set; and
• B, the Smith set induced by the rankings.

Both sets are then made public.

In the second voting stage, knowing A and B, voters answer two independent questions:

(2.1) Vote either to elect from the Score winner set A, or to elect from the Smith set B.

This is deliberately an ex ante judgment. The voter knows both candidate sets, but—when either contains multiple candidates—does not necessarily know which particular candidate will ultimately be selected from the chosen set.

(2.2) Cast a fresh ballot over the candidates needed to resolve the chosen branch. In the version I tested, this was a fresh Approval ballot over the Smith set; if the Score winner set contains multiple candidates, the ballot can analogously include the members of A needed to break that tie.

Finally:

• if a majority in (2.1) chooses the Score branch, elect the fresh-ballot score winner from A (ordinarily A will contain only one original Score winner);
• otherwise, elect the fresh-ballot score winner from B.

Thus the first ballot produces two competing claims about the appropriate winner: an unrestricted cardinal winner and a winner drawn from the reported majority-dominant set. The second stage asks the electorate, after seeing those sets, which claim it wishes to validate.

The structure can be generalized, for instance, using the IRV winner rather than Score/Approval, or using a different completion method in the Smith set.

I wanted to bring up something from the past that never came to fruition, which was the idea to vote on voting systems. The idea was to have users include a ranked score-carrying ballot in their forum signature (you can see mine below as an example), and to intermittently compare them to see what users thought. All that was ~discussed here:

https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/237/proposed-options-for-voting-on-voting-methods/25?_=1785984453512

Anyway, after digging through the old forum threads, I tried to reconstruct a “metaelection” from the score ballots that various users have put in their signatures or explicitly posted.

So far I’ve recovered commensurate ballots from only a small collection of users:

• cfrank (myself)
• Jack Waugh
• multi_system_fan
• Marylander
• Andy Dienes (former user)
• Keith Edmonds

(I also found evidence that rob had a ballot in his signature, but I haven’t yet recovered the actual scores.)

While this is not necessarily representative of all users or even voting theory enthusiasts in general, and does not include all voting methods one might in principle prefer, I wanted to see what the results were from the limited scope and “turnout.”

To make the ballots comparable, I grouped together the various rated/cardinal Condorcet methods (e.g. Score Sorted Margins, generic cardinal Condorcet, rated Condorcet), rescaled Marylander’s 0–100 ballot to 0–10, and then compared the common methods.

The aggregate score totals are:

• Cardinal Condorcet: 55.0
• STAR: 48.0
• Approval: 42.9
• Score: 39.1
• IRV: 12.8
• Choose-one/FPTP: 4.0

Pairwise, cardinal Condorcet defeated STAR, Approval, and Score by 4–2, making it the Condorcet winner of the metaelection as well.

It also won under Score, STAR, Borda, Plurality, and IRV. Under Approval, the outcome depended on the approval threshold: using the suggested threshold of 5 gave a three-way tie between cardinal Condorcet, Approval, and STAR, while a stricter threshold (>5) elected cardinal Condorcet outright.

At least from the ballots I could recover, the collective ordering was:

1. Cardinal/rated Condorcet
2. STAR
3. Approval
4. Score
5. IRV
6. Choose-one/FPTP

If anyone knows of additional signature ballots (or can recover rob’s old ballot), it would be interesting to incorporate them.

We can compare with an external poll on Reddit (this poll is not a vote, but asks which single-winner system among alternatives is most preferred):

https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1cukxrz/what_singlewinner_method_do_you_support_the_most/

Interestingly (or perhaps uninterestingly?), if we pool together all Condorcet methods, our small toy election matches quite well with the top preferences in the Reddit poll.

I would also like to hold that kind of election not in terms of the most preferred voting method outright, but in terms of what the most feasible reform target to implement would be. That’s a bit vague—for example, would that mean implement state-based/federal approval voting? Or to push for proportional representation in districts?

Based on this preliminary outcome, a cardinal-Smith method with a STAR-style fallback or completion rule might be worth considering, although that specific composite was not itself included uniformly on the ballots. I was also surprised to find that, unless I overlooked something, this specific hybrid had not been proposed before now on this forum. It has been proposed elsewhere, including within various Reddit threads.

Finally, on the subject of voting for voting methods, I wonder if it would make sense to have the electorate vote on their preferred method along with their ballots, or to vote for their preferred method in advance. That’s probably a different topic.

@clay, this appears to undermine itself at several important points. You claim to have completely debunked Kant, but then concede that your definitional move yields only a stalemate, that the genealogical critique cuts equally against your own foundation, that “free and fully informed” may smuggle in normativity, and that Kantian constitutivism remains a live dispute. Those concessions are incompatible with the claimed total refutation. I recommend writing the argument as explicit premises and implications; the problems should become apparent.

Even if we admit preference sovereignty, its own formulation is severely self-limiting. It applies only where all affected parties would freely and unanimously choose an outcome while fully informed, which is already immediately divorced from any dilemma that involves conflicting interests. Consequently, that principle in itself does not imply aggregate utility maximization in cases of conflicting interests.

To derive aggregate utility maximization, Harsanyi introduces additional assumptions through an identity-lottery construction. That construction can make aggregate utility numerically equivalent to the expected utility of a hypothetical identity-uncertain chooser, but it does not make that quantity identical to each actual person’s utility, nor does it establish why taking Harsanyi’s hypothetical standpoint is normatively authoritative.

What you have, in effect, is a selected collection of normative operations—idealized preference under conditions of rationality, freedom, and full information; identity uncertainty; expected-utility reasoning; and interpersonal aggregation—that define your ethical framework. Choosing different operations can and does yield competing ethical theories that you have not eliminated.

To be clear, some of those operations are at least superficially appealing. The preference-sovereignty principle is almost a tautological no-brainer within its stated scope, and the arguments that follow once we accept the normative premises built into Harsanyi’s construction may be perfectly valid. But those premises are exactly where justification is lacking, where competing alternatives are abundant, and where legitimate disagreement obviously exists.

We are clearly not getting anywhere, so I’ll offer my ultimate relevant point on this subject and stop. I think the election-by-jury concept is an interesting and reasonable proposal with compelling arguments in its support, and that while there are also completely valid concerns, it’s also plausible that those concerns could be effectively addressed with more collaborative examination and careful approaches to implementation. It has controversial aspects, but it isn’t a wholly radical idea. I think there are also legitimate generalizations that are equally interesting and reasonable topics of discussion.

@clay you can plug your ears and say La La La all you like. Kantian ethics is a perfectly legitimate alternative to utilitarian ethics.

@clay Kant does a fair job of that, in direct contest with utilitarian ethics, through his categorical imperative, as one example. If you engaged with ethics as deeply as you claim, you would be well aware of that.

@clay “real philosophers” say many different things about almost everything. I’ll repeat the main point that you did not address: What you have not explained is why an “ought” proposition cannot likewise describe a higher-order property of a broader configuration involving agents, actions, alternatives, and consequences.

Youtube Video

@clay sure, if we all agree to hook ourselves up to the National Brain Swapping Initiative’s Brain-Swapper 2000 every time a new policy decision is made, you’re pretty much on the money.

@clay “aggregate utility maximization objectively gives everyone more of whatever it is they subjectively prefer.”

Unless there is a known feasible option that maximizes every individual’s utility simultaneously, with no interpersonal tradeoffs, that is simply false. Aggregate utility maximization maximizes the sum or expected sum of utilities, not each person’s utility.

@clay, well then, at least we can be highly confident that you subjectively prefer aggregate utility maximization—and, on your account, that neither you nor anyone else has any substantive, non-preference-based reason to adopt that position.

@clay that does not answer the question. You rejected “ought” because it does not refer to an objective physical law of nature. “Preference” does not refer to one either. Saying that preferences are subjective and can be inferred from behavior simply replaces your original criterion with behavioral elicitation.

Granting that preferences are descriptively real, it still does not follow that satisfying or aggregating them is good. That is the normative premise you keep declining to examine.

You appear to accept that a preference can be a legitimate higher-order description of some material configuration. What you have not explained is why an “ought” proposition cannot likewise describe a higher-order property of a broader configuration involving agents, actions, alternatives, and consequences.

Anyway, this is beyond the scope of this forum.

@clay, can you show me any actual objective physical law of nature that the word ‘preference’ could possibly refer to?

@masiarek no trouble from me on that account. I just wanted to reiterate my understanding of the paper: it seems like, at best, the authors may have identified an alternative way to define what is equivalently IRV. Even granting that IRV is the unique voting method that satisfies some specific property (which in the case of their stated property is itself suspect), the property itself is not established as good to begin with, as @Toby-Pereira makes clear. In fact, as far as I can tell, it’s the exact reverse; I.e., “since IRV is bad, so must be the property.”

If the property is independently and coherently defined, it may still be mathematically useful to establish that demanding it is equivalent to demanding IRV. But no normative conclusion about IRV follows from that equivalence alone. Treating the characterization itself as a normative defense of IRV would be a non sequitur.

In a recent discussion of an election-by-jury proposal, a broader question arose concerning the nature of political representation:

May an office legitimately represent constituent political units, communities, or federated bodies, or must legitimate representation ultimately be based only on individual persons represented directly and on an equal basis?

The immediate discussion can be found here:
https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/623/election-by-jury-www-electionbyjury-com-manifesto/40

This is a longstanding disagreement in political theory. Debates concerning the representation of individuals, states, local communities, and other constituent bodies were already central to the Federalist and Antifederalist disputes surrounding the founding of the United States. Similar questions continue to arise in discussions of federalism, bicameralism, local autonomy, sovereignty, and democratic legitimacy.

I would like to raise the issue here for broader discussion. I expect that participants may approach it from quite different normative premises and theories of political legitimacy.

My hope is that this can proceed as a Socratic discussion. For that reason, I ask that everyone remain polite and respectful and that, when disagreement reaches genuinely incompatible premises, participants be willing to identify that disagreement clearly rather than treating the other position as foolish or illegitimate.

Participants should try to state one premise at a time, explain their reasons for accepting it, and ask bounded, good-faith questions about the premises offered by others. No premise should be presumed shared merely because it appears obvious; participants should establish agreement where it is needed for an argument to proceed.

Some possible starting questions are:

1. What kinds of entities can meaningfully be represented: individual persons only, or also states, municipalities, nations, communities, institutions, or other organized bodies?
2. What makes representation legitimate: numerical equality, authorization, accountability, consent, affected interests, historical compact, or something else?
3. May different offices or legislative chambers legitimately represent different kinds of constituencies?
4. Does equal citizenship require that every political institution represent individuals on an equal basis, or only that the constitutional system as a whole secure each citizen meaningful and sufficient political standing?
5. When does representation of constituent units protect pluralism and autonomy, and when does it become an unjustified departure from political equality?
6. Under what circumstances, if any, might direct representation of individuals be an unsuitable basis for a particular office, compared with representation through constituent political units or communities?

Because this is a contentious subject, I ask participants to review the Code of Conduct before posting and to ensure that their contributions comply with it. The Code of Conduct can be found here:
https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/16/read-me-code-of-conduct?_=1783225633021

Thank you in advance to anyone who offers their thoughts.

@clay, there is no purpose in continuing this discussion with you. Your approach to discourse is unlikely to convince others, and it is not because you are right while everyone else is wrong. A good-faith response to a serious objection is to examine the premise and answer the question—not repeatedly declare the questioner confused. If you continue engaging with others on this forum in this manner, I expect you will receive responses similar to mine, and if you continue not to adhere to the Code of Conduct, you may eventually face moderation action, including a ban.

Regarding reading material, I linked you to the Code of Conduct, and I strongly advise that you read it before continuing to participate here. I would also suggest consulting a standard dictionary entry for “normative,” since the term does not mean “whatever satisfies my preferences.”

Readers can judge this exchange for themselves. You repeatedly cite your own writings as authority, refuse to engage reasonable objections in good faith, and do not answer basic questions put to you. The external citations you provide are themselves significantly more measured than your presentation of them suggests. Harsanyi, for example, explicitly presented his conclusions as conditional on particular ethical postulates and assumptions about rational choice and interpersonal comparison; he did not claim to have mathematically proved the uniquely correct theory of justice. I see no value for me, for you, for this forum, or for the broader reform movement in continuing this exchange. Best of luck to you.

@clay, I introduced “normative” to mean questions about what institutions ought to do and what arrangements are justified. That is the standard use in political philosophy. You may argue that normativity reduces to subjective preference, but that is your metaethical theory, and that conclusion has not been established here, nor is it the definition of the term.

You now appear to be defending total utilitarianism: for a given population, the best outcome is the one with the highest sum of utilities. That is a controversial normative principle, not something mathematics proves on its own. A theorem may show what follows from a chosen social-welfare function; it does not prove that summed utility is the uniquely correct standard of justice. Without an independently justified method for specifying and comparing utilities, the framework can be made to rationalize radically different outcomes simply by changing the utility assignments. Your own citation is substantially more cautious about interpersonal utility comparison than your claims here.

Regardless, your framework also seems to give rights, consent, sovereignty, self-determination, and distribution no independent force. They apparently matter only insofar as they affect the utility total. So I will ask again: if a large outside population gains many small benefits by confiscating nearly all resources from a smaller region whose residents suffer catastrophic losses, is that policy “by definition good” whenever the summed utility favors the outsiders?

Nor does “elections” solve the problem of cardinal interpersonal utility comparison. Elections record choices under a particular procedure and produce a collective decision; they do not place different people’s welfare on a common measurable scale.

Furthermore, the veil of ignorance reasoning does not by itself imply that individuals would prefer social positions that maximize their expected utility. A chooser behind the veil may evaluate not only their expected payoff, but also the distribution of benefits and burdens, the condition of the worst-off, exposure to domination, and whether some losses may legitimately be imposed for others’ gains. Treating the veil as a device for maximizing summed expected utility imports the utilitarian conclusion into the assumptions rather than deriving it.

So the normative question remains: should political institutions be governed solely by aggregate preference satisfaction, or do rights, consent, distribution, non-domination, self-determination, and political membership have independent importance? You have asserted one answer. You have not shown that the question is confused or that your answer is mathematically compulsory rather than a contestable normative commitment.

@clay you misunderstand. I am both a participant in this discussion and a moderator of the forum. The moderation note concerns your conduct; the rest of my post concerns your argument.

For reference, the Code of Conduct can be found here: https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/16/read-me-code-of-conduct?_=1783225633021

@clay, you still have not answered the questions I asked. But your response regarding Hawaii is clarifying. You appear to be saying that if a sufficiently large outside population gains enough aggregate utility from controlling policy in Hawaii, then such control is “by definition good,” regardless of Hawaiian self-government, political membership, jurisdiction, or consent.

Is that in fact your position?

If so, then your theory does not merely reject territorial weighting within an existing polity. It rejects any independent normative significance for self-determination, sovereignty, jurisdiction, bounded political membership, or consent whenever aggregate external utility points the other way. That is a radical substantive political theory, not “trivial basic social choice theory.”

The same logic would appear to permit a policy such as: “Take all extractable resources from region A and transfer them to region B,” provided that the aggregate utility gain claimed for the population of B exceeded the aggregate utility loss imposed on the population of A. Would that policy therefore be “by definition good” under your framework?

More fundamentally, how do you propose to measure utility and make cardinal interpersonal comparisons of it across the affected individuals? It seems unlikely to me that we could use, for example, atoms, or some such thing.

Moderator note: Describing another participant’s mental models as “profoundly broken” is personal disparagement. Address the argument rather than the participant’s competence. You have already been warned about this. Further personal disparagement may result in moderation action.