Topics created by cfrank

As said, voters can often face a dilemma of whether to approve someone or not. What counts as approval etc. If I approve my second favourite candidate, what if it turns out my favourite could have won after all?

Also under ranked voting, ranks have less of an obvious meaning so a voter doesn't have to feel they are explicitly endorsing a candidate when they rank them over someone else. Say my preference order is A>B>C and B and C are the frontrunners, but I hate both B and C while preferring B to C. I might happily rank A>B>C. But to explicitly approve B might be a step too far, even though it's the strategically optimal vote for me.

Also, it really invites people to say that it violates one person, one vote, and you have to explain why it doesn't.

@cfrank sign this petition to get RFK Jr. in the presidential debates: https://www.kennedy24.com/debate-petition

@isocratia yeah that kind of thing really seems counterproductive, and strange.

@lime I see, so this would be used in absence of a Condorcet winner like for a ranked pairs resolution?

I was trying to think about burial but I don’t think my method addresses it quite as I conceived. My reasoning was that, by replacing absolute score differences with their more robust percentiles, burial (and bullet voting) strategies will suffer from severely diminishing returns compared with less risky and more honest ballots. For example, burying a second-favorite below a turkey to support a first favorite probably won’t significantly improve the score percentile provided by that voter to the first favorite’s runoff with the second favorite, but will significantly improve the chances of the turkey winning. This makes dishonest burial more severely punished and risky, meaning that fewer rational voters will choose to do it. Also, the effects of the fraction that do will be significantly reduced, since they will not only be fewer in number, but the magnitude of their indicated score differences will be majorly reeled back upon being replaced by their percentiles relative to the more honest bulk.

At the same time, the method is not restricted to Condorcet compliance, since, for example, it is possible for a [1-sqrt(1/2)]~0.2928… fraction minority of voters to overrule a sqrt(1/2)~0.707… fraction majority as long as the whole minority has the top quantile of absolute score differences and all of them have the same sign. That is the smallest possible minority that can overrule a majority in this method. It’s in one sense a generalized, more flexible extension of some of the reasonable measures we already have in the legislative houses, where for example a supermajority (2/3) is required for certain decisions.

Alternatively, each absolute score difference percentile could be measured relative to the distribution of all absolute score differences across all differences. The data set would consist of N*K(K-1)/2 values where N is the number of voters and K is the number of candidates.

@toby-pereira I believe burial is significantly more risky with SQNV than with Borda, due to the general non-linear and unknown nature of the final normalized positional scores. Burying a second-favorite front runner below the top half of one’s ranks significantly increases the risk that a turkey will win, and “half burying” the second-favorite (placing them just above the half way mark) still may provide a fair deal of support for that candidate. It’s really risky to place turkeys above the half way mark unless absolutely necessary for the same reason.

This of course doesn’t necessarily stop turkey raising and burial from happening, but the non-linearity introduces significantly more severe deterrence against burial and turkey raising for a rational voter. At the same time, SQNV frequently elects the Condorcet winner (I would say “more frequently than score” for example, but that would be based anecdotally on the examples I’ve observed).

I think one step for analysis would be to see if SQNV elects the Condorcet winner in cases where Borda does not. My guess is that this happens quite often, which would be a heuristic indication that SQNV generally has better burial resistance than Borda.

@jack-waugh said in Quantile-Normalized Score:

Which voters are going to have their votes diluted by such a procedure?

In reply to this, you might be interested to note that, based at least on my own observations of the symmetrized version, it is the bullet-voters and min-maxers who will have the advantages of their tactical behavior reduced in favor of a broader consensus, in a fashion very similar to what would be expected in a Condorcet method. However, the method is not Condorcet compliant, I found a counter-example.

@jack-waugh I don’t follow.

@toby-pereira said in Entropy-Statistic-Weighted Approval Voting:

While I don't think it would be a good method in practice

The 2 most popular voting systems in practice are IRV and plurality. Anything is a good method in practice 😄

I can't see a proof that it is additive. I can't see a proof that it is Frohnmayer balanced. If a system isn't both of those things, I don't know how to convince myself that it accords equal influence to the voters regardless of how many or few candidates the voters oppose. And without equality, I fear that the monied interests can find a strategy within the system to confine the voters to a Prisoner's Dilemma and thereby prevent them from having any effective power over governmental policy.

@cfrank, I don't know how to calculate a probability distribution over a collection of rankings. Maybe someone who knows statistics can understand your proposal and maybe critique it.

In regard to "tragedy", I judge that too broad a word, as it includes accidents, and "past", not fully accurate, because, among other reasons, Mr. Biden is killing children by the minute with US resources.

I ask you to join me in mourning the death of Layan Mohammed Sayed Al-Aker, who was two years old, a girl.

I ask you to join me in spending a minute and a few tears on Samir Mahmoud Hassan Abu Al-Hawa, who was a man, aged 62.

I received the suggestion to "hold space" from an organization, the "US Campaign for Palestinian Rights". Is this organization a grift? Yes, to an extent, they probably are, as indicated by the fact that they have an "executive director", which usually means a person drawing pay out of donations. Nevertheless, I judge the message of this organization more honest than the official story, which "happy Thanksgiving" ties into. This organization suggests for things-taking day, among other practices (which I admit to not having followed):

When you gather with your loved ones, hold space for mourning the mass killing of Indigenous people from Turtle Island to Palestine. Hold a mourning ritual based in your community’s traditions. You may read the names and stories of our beloved people killed by colonial violence (for example, see here).

So I'm endorsing this organization's request, the one that I repeated above, in the context of your having wished me a happy Thanksgiving at this fraught time.

@cfrank I think it's more of a multi-election system, and it's kind of orthogonal to whether there are multiple winners or what method is used to determine the winner (plurality, RCV, etc). It's about how many votes you can cast on a given issue, for situations where "one person, one vote" is effectively unfair to minorities who are affected more sharply then the majority by a particular question. (Disclaimer: this is all just my impression and I might have it totally wrong.)

So if you're on a city council and you'll be voting on 100 bills this term, and a lot of them are about stuff in other districts that you don't care much about, but a few are really important in your district, you could use more of your allotted votes on the ones you care about, so you're less likely to get overruled by people who don't know or care as much about it.

In some variants, each vote costs money, so a billionaire can buy as many votes as they can afford. But at $1/vote, even if they spend $500M to get 500M votes, they could only overrule sqrt(500M)=22,360 people who disagree and spend $1 each on their votes. So it's a way to allow people to buy as many votes as they want if there's an issue that's super important to them, but without letting the wealthy become dictators.

@sarawolk yes more or less a thought experiment, trying to address some dissonance between the possibility of a Condorcet winner having low support and a support (approval) winner being different from the Condorcet winner even when one exists.

In this case, I mean that a candidate is either supported or not supported by a voter according to the support cutoff of their ballot. I’m using the word “support” rather than “approval,” because I don’t think approval is an appropriate word philosophically (or mathematically). The positive emotional connotation of “approve” is all that bothers me. “Support” seems more emotionally neutral and has a mathematical meaning that aligns well with what is happening in the system, for example, “the support of a distribution.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Support_(mathematics)

The quantity of support of a candidate is simply the number of voters who formally support that candidate on their ballot.

Here is another attempt at a modification. In sequence, if there is a Condorcet loser, they are eliminated. If there is no Condorcet loser, a candidate with the least quantity of support is eliminated, with ties broken by rank runoff if possible. Repeat until one candidate remains.

What about This one?

@cfrank I'm not really the best person to ask about these methods probably. I don't know off the top of my head what criteria they pass/fail. However, the Landau set and others are discussed more here.

@toby-pereira a historical re-enactment in the style of this video is to have one of the kids tying his shoelaces together with another’s or something, and then the third winning because the other two fell over 😂 Also, the ridiculous irony of using a race like that to demonstrate their argument is: the winner of the race IS the Condorcet winner!

In fact, I think using a race analogy is a great way to convince people that the Condorcet winner is at least worth consideration when it exists. And a Condorcet cycle could be shown with runners chasing each other in a circle rather than proceeding toward the finish line.