I am in touch with a group of people who think they are working on a platform for a national-level political party (I am a full voting member). They have heard of STAR and are acquainted with one or two people whose opinions they respect who favor STAR. I think I have convinced them that the platform should not call for a single voting system for all uses, on the grounds that circumstances differ and that State parties should decide based on the circumstances. The draft provisions being passed around in the group tend to mention more than one voting system. But, I want to convince them not to include any favorable mention of RCV/IRV whatsoever. What is the most convincing argument I can take to them that the risk of a spoiler effect is too high with IRV?
Jack Waugh
@Jack Waugh
Author of the code[1] that presents the archive[2] and the home page[3]. Also, I set up the hosting[4] and installed[5] NodeBB.
"William Waugh" in older fora on this subject.
[1] https://bitbucket.org/voting-theory-forum/archive
[2] https://www.votingtheory.org/archive
[3] https://www.votingtheory.org/
[4] https://bitbucket.org/voting-theory-forum/sys_adm_ubuntu
[5] https://bitbucket.org/voting-theory-forum/root
Best posts made by Jack Waugh
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RCV IRV Hare
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RE: Transparency of https://www.votingtheory.org/
Thanks for pointing out that omission. The info has been available via published minutes of the forum council, but it's better to have a summary in the present category (which is whither the "About" button on the home page leads), so I posted it.
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RE: Ranked Robin Disadvantages -
Here is a ranking of forms of expression by expressivity:
- Least expressive: strict ranking.
- Middlingly expressive: ranking allowing equal-ranking.
- Most expressive: ratio scale.
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Weekly Live Q&A
Every Tuesday, at 20:00 New York time (16:00 UTC), @Sass answers questions on voting systems at bit.ly/democracy-discussions
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Mitigating Risks To This Forum
I see no low-cost, no-risk solution to a question regarding control of this domain name in case someone dies or otherwise becomes incapacitated. The domain registrar firm understands a relationship with an individual, and maybe a legal entity could be substituted for the individual. But as far as I know, creating a legal entity requires paying a lawyer, and I am unwilling to do that. But the current situation is that so far as the domain registrar firm is concerned, a single human individual owns this domain name. That individual has a credit card, the registrar is able to charge this credit card, and will do so if someone who knows the password orders more services. I am sure it is no surprise to any of you that I am that individual. With no arrangements in place other than these, the forum users bear a risk that I die from CoVid19 or getting run over by a truck or whatever (I am almost 70), and no one renews the domain, and so it expires, which would lead to the forum going under. So a possible solution is I could place trust in several of you to control the domain, and tell you the password, but then I would be effectively putting people I don't really know all that well in a position where they could hit my credit card. I suppose I could make some of you the executors of my estate in my last will and testament. Then you'd have to show the domain registrar your letters testamentary so you could take control of the account. I don't know whether the firm would respond in a timely fashion to such a communication.
The _equalvote.org_ organization has decided to accept this discussion forum as a partner organization. They are a legal entity (I guess) and so the obvious solution would be to transfer the domain name to their control. Then if whoever is in control of the server (again, that is currently I) become unresponsive and someone else has a backup and wants to bring up a new server with the data and code, they can just e'splain that to equalvote.org and it can point the domain name to the new server. I guess I would like to see some statement by active users of the forum that they are willing to trust equalvote.org to that degree, if that is going to be the solution.
@rob @paretoman @Casimir @Andy-Dienes @last19digitsofpi @masiarek @culi @rb-j @marcosb @BTernaryTau @BetterVoting @frenzed @Keith-Edmonds @Toby-Pereira @wolftune @Ted-Stern @wbport @multi_system_fan @Psephomancy @robertpdx @tec @Essenzia
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RE: Terms for Specific Voting Systems
@rob said in Terms for Specific Voting Systems:
I think most of the general public in the US just calls it "voting".
I agree. I think it doesn't occur to most US people that more than one way to vote would be possible, and so it doesn't enter their mind to have a term for the way they do it as to be distinguished from possible other ways.
In one of the antisocial media, when I mentioned some alternative system, someone responded that that would be fake voting.
I suspect that many self-described "conservatives" would expect that any proposal to change the voting system comes from "liberals" looking for a way to win elections unfairly at the expense of "conservatives". I put those terms in quotes because I am referring to people using those terms. I do not know what the users of those terms think the "conservatives" want to conserve or what the "liberals" want to liberate. I would use the terms without horror quotes if I stood ready to answer those questions should you ask them of me.
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RE: Technical To-do List
@Toby-Pereira Maybe I can get them with a limited form of screen scraping.
Or maybe @SaraWolk can prevail upon CES to give us the images. I have no sway to even get CES to acknowledge receipt of a message. While she is at it, she could also ask them for an updated dump of the other data, or just the items added or changed since they sent us the dump they sent.
The first image in that post, on the original site (implemented with Discourse) is rendered with a document element as the following HTML would specify:
<img src="https://forum.electionscience.org/uploads/default/optimized/1X/cf86b73999447d4ed4ca89c8029dac48835e5a33_2_577x499.png" alt="Voters" data-base62-sha1="tBRsJE42NBx6MHq3EKBgNtMIsHp" class="d-lazyload" srcset="https://forum.electionscience.org/uploads/default/optimized/1X/cf86b73999447d4ed4ca89c8029dac48835e5a33_2_577x499.png, https://forum.electionscience.org/uploads/default/optimized/1X/cf86b73999447d4ed4ca89c8029dac48835e5a33_2_865x748.png 1.5x, https://forum.electionscience.org/uploads/default/original/1X/cf86b73999447d4ed4ca89c8029dac48835e5a33.png 2x" width="577" height="499">
The reference to it in the data dump that we received from CES and on which I base the archive, looks like this:
<img src="upload://tBRsJE42NBx6MHq3EKBgNtMIsHp.png" alt="Voters|577x499">
upload: is not a legal scheme for use in a URI. Discourse is parsing it and substituting the long version as above.
Maybe in exchange for an annual monetary tribute, CES would be willing to keep the original site up.
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RE: For the Language Geeks
@Toby-Pereira said in STAR-like method ("reverse STAR"?):
Copeland
Which leads down a rabbit-hole all the way back to the middle ages and writings in Latin. https://d-nb.info/1212798317/34 talks about the sources and gives text and translations in PDF, and leads to https://www.math.uni-augsburg.de/htdocs/emeriti/pukelsheim/llull/ , which gives the text and translations as web pages.
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Setup for Simulating in a Browser
I want to put code up that can run in a browser to simulate elections. A peripheral question I am struggling with concerns how from the user's viewpoint to set up the volatile memory of the parameter values.
I say volatile memory, because at this point I am not planning to tackle allowing people to register and log in so they could store values on the server. So I want to allow that you could fill in form widgets to set up the values you want for the parameters of the simulation, and those would be there in front of you, so long as you didn't navigate to another website. I want to make an encoding of the parameter values available as text that you could copy out and paste somewhere else to save.
It should be possible to load the volatile memory with a set of preset values from the server; those would be constant for a given version of the server.
It should be possible to clear out the parameter values and start over.
It should be possible to edit the volatile memory of the parameters.
So, a question I have is of whether to provide a way that the user could access several named slots in the volatile memory, each slot to have a complete assignment of values to parameters. The alternative would be to just have a single slot.
Latest posts made by Jack Waugh
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RE: Smith // Score
@lime, yeah, you could. There is a little bit more risk that the workers in one precinct get tired and keep everyone waiting.
Maybe a useful policy would say conduct the election with computers and the Internet, let the result go into effect, then verify everything by hand. It might be easier to check a proposed outcome than to compute it from scratch.
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RE: STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters
@lime said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:
... So then shouldn't we be encouraging voters to give preferences as close to honesty as possible, to make sure we have as little error as possible?
No, in my opinion, we shouldn't. That's asking them to play the sucker, in the presence of a voting system that can get, I think, the right answer in case no party plays sucker. The proper use of Score Voting is to apply a tactic to maximize the expected value of the outcome. And I doubt whether STAR behaves significantly differently. It's just extra complexity for no gain.
@jack-waugh said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:
"Honest voting" is a theoretical concept that can be useful in thought experiments and reasoning and the design of algorithms, etc. However, it does not describe a phenomenon that can happen in real elections in which something important rides on the outcome of the tally.
$20 says it does.
How are we going to test that? With the voters experiencing how many elections where the outcome matters to them? And how are we going to measure the importance of an election?
@jack-waugh said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:
What grounds do you have for coming to such an opinion? I don't think it is correct.
I think that's just the definition of the "best result" under a given metric. Regardless of what social welfare function you pick, that social welfare function will be maximized if voters are honest.
What do you care about? Electing majority winners? A Condorcet method will always elect a Condorcet winner if voters are honest (but not necessarily if they're dishonest). Maximizing social utility? Score voting does that with honest voters (but not always for dishonest voters). Maximizing the number of voters who see their favorite candidate elected? FPP does that with honest voters (but once again, can't with dishonest ones).
No matter which social welfare function you come up with, that social welfare function will do better at its job if it has accurate information than if it has inaccurate information.
The input doesn't have to be accurate information about what the voters want. It suffices, in the case of Score Voting, if it is accurate information about the voter's tactical choice. If just one side votes "honestly" and the other is trying to maximize value, the result will be wrong and will skew to the side that is using the tactic. However, I contend that when all sides are using their respective best tactic, the "pull" balances out and the result will be the same as though all were "honest". The reason to think this is that the system is additive and balanced.
To paraphrase WDS: consider a voting system in which a vote consists of 32 bits. The tally takes the XOR of the ballots and then takes the result modulo the count of candidates to get the index of the winning candidate. How do I cast an "honest" vote in this system?
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RE: STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters
@lime said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:
@jack-waugh said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:
The Gibbard theorem showed that optimal voting takes any guesses or estimates of the positions of other voters into account.
I'm not sure what you're talking about here. Gibbard's theorem just proves there's no single "best" strategy for voting in an election.
Let's read from the introductory part of the Wikipedia article on Gibbard's theorem:
for any deterministic process of collective decision, at least one of the following three properties must hold:
- The process is dictatorial, i.e. there is a single voter whose vote chooses the outcome.
- The process limits the possible outcomes to two options only.
- The process is not straightforward; the optimal ballot for a voter depends on their beliefs about other voters' ballots.
I think you will agree with me that condition 1 does not apply to Score Voting if there is more than one voter, and that elections are possible in which condition 2 does not hold, either. That leaves us with a certainty that condition 3 holds. The optimal vote does not depend merely on the desire of the voter toward the candidates. It must also take into consideration whatever partial knowledge or probability estimates the voter feels in regard to the other voters.
The socially-optimal outcome is only possible if every voter is fully honest.
What grounds do you have for coming to such an opinion? I don't think it is correct.
Enforcing automatic strategy...
For what purpose do you introduce such a topic?
@jack-waugh said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:
In non-official channels of communication, I see urging "honesty" as problematic and dishonest. Voting is not an opinion poll; it is an exercise of political power. It's like steering a boat. When you command "right full rudder", it's not an opinion, but a muscular exercise that feeds into the whole dynamic of the boat's motion in accord with the Laws O' Physics (TM), the design of the boat, the propeller's rotational velocity, etc.
Or we could provide true information and help the system pick a better winner.
No, we can't. We don't have access to the true information. We have no means to extract this from the voters. Voters have free will and their own purposes and values. If we are studying what they do, we may indeed get a pretty good clue about their values, but we cannot guarantee to get it accurately. We don't have the power to coerce them into telling the whole truth about it.
@jack-waugh said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:
then I predict that Faction A will within a few elections figure out that it should use the maximum value (5) and minimum value (0) of the permitted range. I think factions don't usually voluntarily give up power. Elections are contentious.
Empirically, about 60% of voters choose to do so.
They choose to give up power? What situations was this empirical measurement made on? Was anything at stake based on the outcomes from the tallies? How many Score elections had the voters already experienced, where something important was at stake?
When asked if they'd prefer to have a voting strategy automatically executed for them,
Again, for what porpoise do you bring this idea into the conversation?
@jack-waugh said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:
What reasoning leads you to think that Score voters pushing exaggerated support hose toward compromise candidates tends to spoil elections? They are still giving more support to their true favorites. If enough proportion of voters are standing with them, that candidate can win.
Arrow's theorem, which implies that if voters base their on strategic considerations, there will always be spoiler effects.
What is the relevance? The Arrow theorem assumes strict ranking.
(Compare honest score voting, which is completely spoilerproof.)
"Honest voting" is a theoretical concept that can be useful in thought experiments and reasoning and the design of algorithms, etc. However, it does not describe a phenomenon that can happen in real elections in which something important rides on the outcome of the tally.
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RE: MARS: mixed absolute and relative score
If people don't use the maximum number in Score, I'd say they are trying to support "None of the Above" (NOTA). We should require that NOTA is treated as a candidate in all elections and that the specification of the election state what shall happen in case should NOTA win. Some candidates for that are:
- new candidates sought for another attempt to elect someone to the office;
- office abolished
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RE: STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters
@lime said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:
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I wouldn't add anything about tactics; much better to avoid discussing it. I'd rather encourage voters to give honest ratings of each of the candidates, so we can get rid of spoiler effects; instructing them on how to vote tactically (or worse still, instructing them to normalize ballots) increases the rate of spoiled elections.
I disagree.
First off, let's separate official communication about an election from communication from a person's or a group's political takes.
The official communication about an election should indeed avoid laying out or suggesting tactics. It should only state the freedom of movement the voter has in filling out the ballot without invalidating it, and how the tally will work to determine the winner.
In non-official channels of communication, I see urging "honesty" as problematic and dishonest. Voting is not an opinion poll; it is an exercise of political power. It's like steering a boat. When you command "right full rudder", it's not an opinion, but a muscular exercise that feeds into the whole dynamic of the boat's motion in accord with the Laws O' Physics (TM), the design of the boat, the propeller's rotational velocity, etc.
What reasoning leads you to think that Score voters pushing exaggerated support hose toward compromise candidates tends to spoil elections? They are still giving more support to their true favorites. If enough proportion of voters are standing with them, that candidate can win.
Urging "honest" votes as though the election were an opinion poll is just sucker bait. People who follow your urging are giving up power to their opponents.
The Gibbard theorem showed that optimal voting takes any guesses or estimates of the positions of other voters into account.
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RE: State constitutions that require “a plurality of the votes” or the “highest,” “largest,” or “greatest” number of votes.
@lime said in State constitutions that require “a plurality of the votes” or the “highest,” “largest,” or “greatest” number of votes.:
I'm not sure why these would pose a problem for score, as phrased. Under score, the candidate with the largest number of votes wins.
You are getting into dangerous rhetoric. If we say that score points are "votes", it will sound as though we are not "one person, one vote". A vote in Score assigns a score to each candidate.
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RE: STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters
@gregw, then I predict that Faction A will within a few elections figure out that it should use the maximum value (5) and minimum value (0) of the permitted range. I think factions don't usually voluntarily give up power. Elections are contentious.
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RE: State constitutions that require “a plurality of the votes” or the “highest,” “largest,” or “greatest” number of votes.
@gregw said in State constitutions that require “a plurality of the votes” or the “highest,” “largest,” or “greatest” number of votes.:
How do you think Score rates in "constitutionality" compared to approval?
Score Voting also conforms to Wesberry vs. Sanders, but not to the provisions you mention that require "plurality", "the most", etc.
Here's a tactic to make Approval have the same effect, in a large election (thousands of voters) as finer-grained Score. First, decide what your tactical Score vote would be. Normalize that to a scale from 0 to 1 and treat that number as a probability. Approve the candidate with that probability.
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RE: STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters
@gregw said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:
Would you also add something like:
“A 99 score is tactically useful for supporting your second-choice candidate when the first-choice candidate might not be popular enough to win.”No, I wouldn't include that in official instructions or information. It is only a personal opinion. The other parts you said seem right.
Please give an example of a nuanced vote and explain how you think it could work to the disadvantage of the person or faction that casts it.
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RE: Toward A Second Vote On Voting Systems
For discussion: How sċeal wē recruit participants in the nominating and voting from the mailing list, the Reddit forum, any other fora on this topic about which you may know? Sċeal wē avoid requiring them to join the present forum, but instead tell them that they can nominate and vote in the fora they are already in, and that wē commit ourselves to scan those fora and copy the nominations and votes over to here? I guess I don't mind doing that work, but wē have to be clear with ourselves and others in setting deadlines.
Motion: Whoever nominates a voting system commits to tally the metaelection in that system, and show her or his work in doing so. Can I get a second?