Posts made by Jack Waugh

@cfrank Consider a score system with a range of 0 through 5 by 1. Giving Harris a 1 would raise her chances of beating, say, Stein, who gets a 5 from me.

@cfrank I honestly think that Trump and Harris deserve prison for life for supporting the killing of 17,000 Arab children. In a rating system, they both deserve the bottom rate. But on the ranking side, I would put Harris above Trump, because of his domestic fascist tendencies. Coupling would prevent honesty.

I suspect that the tightness of coupling between the rating part and the ranking part is a problem with these schemes. The first ballot should have separate sections (or "races" in the terms of bettervoting.com) for rating and ranking, if we want the absolute peak of accuracy.

Or how about use the Score winner as one finalist, and the Minimax winner as the other.

So, to make a more concrete proposal for how to narrow the field to two finalists, we could say collect Score-style five-star ballots, and present the Score winner as one finalist, and do something like Copeland to get the other finalist, who would be the calculated Condorcet winner if there is one, and would be otherwise pretty good as determined by Copeland-like techniques in the absence of a Condorcet winner.

A real runoff is not complex to understand, at least in principle. Do you think that actually running one could produce a more accurate result than would be produced by the best of systems (like approval-seeded Llull, for example) that perform "instant" runoff rounds of tallying, but do not require the voters to return for a second polling?

How large? What would be a good name for the resulting system? Would it address your original concerns equally so well as a second polling would?

Approval-seeded Llull:

Ballots: voters classify each candidate as good or bad, and within each of those classes, they rank the candidates, with equal ranking permitted.

Tally:

First, the tally orders the candidates by how many "good" classifications they got from the voters. The candidate that got the most goes at the top.

Next, the tally compares the bottom two candidates on the list with regard to how many voters ranked one over the other minus how many ranked them in the opposite order. The loser of this comparison is stricken from the list.

The tally repeats the bottom-two comparisons until only one candidate remains; this is the winner.

Discussion:

Approval-seeded Llull is an hybrid rating-ranking system. The rankings are less tightly coupled to the ratings, as compared to how tightly they are coupled in STAR.

Why this might solve the problems you bring up:

There is no incentive to warp the ranking aspect for a strategic motivation coming from the rating aspect of the tally, nor vice versa (maybe?).

Example application to a real political controversy: Consider the 2024 US Presidential election. A voter would not have to classify Ms. Harris as "good" to rank her over Mr. Trump. They could receive the same rating but different rankings. Trump would have been less likely to win, I think, than he would have under STAR, because with STAR, voters who could not bring themselves to give Harris even a 1, on the grounds that she supports the elimination of every Arab in Gaza, would thereby be forced into not ranking her above Trump.

Do you think that Approval-seeded Llull adequately addresses the concern?

Inability to comment seems to be a new problem. It didn't restrict me when I first started using it, even as an ordinary user separate from the initial admin accounts.

https://forby.io/

A stunning loss.

How should ABC voting treat unmarked candidates?

Who knows how the Gibbard theorem applies to ABC voting? In optimizing my vote, how do I take into account the stances of the other voters? Assume I know them perfectly. Do I maybe exaggerate support for a compromise candidate from D to C, with a metered probability?

which leads to https://github.com/Election-Tech-Initiative/electionguard/blob/main/docs/concepts/Verifiability.md

Suppose a tallying algo is enacted that requires a preference matrix. What grounds could be cited to convince the public that each precinct correctly sums up the preferences in the votes to build the precinct-level addend to the preference matrix?

I first heard of ABC Voting when Beloved Comrade @Ex-dente-leonem posted about it and another system (Score B2R). I think that ABC Voting is so interesting that I'm starting the present post dedicated to just it.

I'm hereby running up the flagpole an alternative name IRV-Llull in contrast to IRV-Ware.

I heard arguments from two individuals who push for three-valued Score with the default being in the middle and the numbers set so that the middle is zero and the bottom is -1. Both of these advocates opine that voters need an explicit way to express impassioned opposition to a candidate. I think they may be right about that need, but I don't like their proposed solution. I hereby suggest that ABC voting fulfills that need not only psychologically, but better, by acting in the tally in a way that honors that impassioned opposition to the max. In this system, a voter can clearly oppose a candidate with any of the grades D, E, or F, because these grades deny the candidate a positive point for the initial ordering. Within that, the system still provides a way to express a preference for the lesser evil over the greater evil, and it provides that without compromising the effect of the voter's expression concerning the voter's preferred candidates, whom the voter will naturally place them up in the A, B, and C region. For these reasons, I want to sing the praises of this system.

For readers coming on this system here for the first time, I'll repeat how it works:

• Voters assign A, B, C, D, E or F to each candidate. Unmentioned candidates, I suggest, get D. This is my sop to those who think such should get the middle in a score system.

• A, B, or C confers a point of tolerance for the candidate; D, E, and F do not.

• The tally starts by arranging the candidates in order of how many tolerating votes they got, with the most tolerated candidate by that measure at the top of the list.

• The Llull stage of the tally begins, as though the candidates had entered the church in the order determined above (or maybe it's the reverse of that order). In any event, the bottom two candidates on the list are compared first, according to how many voters expressed a preference for one over the other minus how many expressed the opposite preference. A candidate who receives an "E" from a given voter, for example, is understood to be preferred by that voter over a candidate who receives an "F". Whichever candidate loses that comparison is removed from the list.

• The bottom-two comparisons according to voter counts who prefer one candidate over the other vs. the opposite preference are repeated until only one candidate remains on the list. That is the winner.

@cfrank I agree that for purposes of "one person, one vote", two approvals or two disapprovals should not count as two votes. However, legislators and judges and juries seem to lack for an ability to think straight.