Topics created by cfrank

@toby-pereira yes definitely. I started trying to actually prove participation last evening, and it got much hairier than I would have liked... lots of branching edge-case conditions. I think an actual proof (or counterexample) of participation for this system would require some nice insights, and/or a larger scale planning and brute-force organized accounting of every relevant case.

For example, I’m quite certain the new participant V can never change the top sorted candidate to somebody they prefer less. So it would have to be an upset via the B2R survivor, who would have to become the new winner, and be preferred less than the old winner by V. But that situation gets complicated in terms of the sorting and the rank tie-breaking authority.

@jack-waugh but that’s always the tradeoff with score systems, which is why people bullet vote and/or min-max (translate to approval). I totally understand what you’re saying though.

I’m not saying the “Condorcet adversary” should be the score winner, just that they should be a strong alternative. Your approval-seeded Llull ballot could accommodate an approval winner as the Condorcet/Smith-method’s adversary, for example.

I think a “rank with approval cutoff” ballot makes sense. Then there could be the approval winner, and, say, the B2R (Smith compliant) winner, followed by an independent head-to-head.

https://forby.io/

@matija yeah, it seems that there were many factors that converged. I guess we never know what might have been or might be especially instrumental per se in the rise of anti-democratic regimes. As we’re seeing now in the USA, even supposedly “stable” vote-for-one systems are vulnerable to the most basic kind of fragmentation, namely splitting in half.

I’m not sure how stable these systems are then, considering the bipolar oscillations of government. The same gridlocks that make legislature impotent appear in a more blatant form. To me, that means vote-for-one is even less desirable than previously imagined, since even its claim to purported stability is moot.

Thank you both for keeping an eye on this and deleting the spam. If you have suggestions for the settings I'm open to whatever seems like the best option. I don't have strong opinions either way as long as people like you both are taking care of it if it does occur.

If that wasn't the case I'd say we should look into other options.

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.

@toby-pereira apparently so, because they left. But honestly in terms of the purpose of a forum, that doesn’t really subtract from anything.

Anyway, this original post was made well before RFK Jr.’s (imo reluctant) alignment with Trump. At least one of RFK Jr.’s predictions was correct, namely that Biden and/or Harris would not beat Trump. His “no spoiler” pledge would have given beating Trump the greatest possible chance, but Democrats refused to cooperate because they are power hungry, greedy, and benefit too much from the duopoly to concede to a third party candidate, even at the cost of Trump winning.

IMO, that’s primarily why RFK Jr. angled against them, in game theory terms it was as a punishment. It was a textbook failed prisoner’s dilemma, and they got a taste of their own medicine in a way that hurt everybody and could have been avoided. But I digress.

@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 😄