I think it does a good job of refudiating the advertised benefits of RCV-Hare.
Posts made by Jack Waugh
-
RE: rcvchangedalaska.com
-
RE: What Multiwinner Method To Push For Local Boards?
@toby-pereira said in What Multiwinner Method To Push For Local Boards?:
There's always been the question with score voting of whether some voters will lose out by casting a more honest ballot but losing out strategically.
When the voting system is Choose-one Plurality (bad COP), do they lose out by casting a more honest ballot but losing out tactically?
-
{100, 99, 1, 0} Ballots
I think they would work great, tallied either as plain Score or looking for a CW first. Also, with only four possibilities, they would be easier to count by hand than Score with more or STAR. Also, they might bypass any objection, particularly coming from Hare-lovers, that Approval is insufficiently expressive (although I think that objection is false).
-
RE: What Multiwinner Method To Push For Local Boards?
@gregw said in What Multiwinner Method To Push For Local Boards?:
I think that voters will prefer Score ballots over Approval ballots, but I could be wrong.
Maybe a better question is which is more likely to go over with politicians who could change it. Not all States have initiative and referendum.
-
RE: What Multiwinner Method To Push For Local Boards?
Is monotonicity equally so important for the multiwinner context as it is in the single-winner context?
-
RE: What Multiwinner Method To Push For Local Boards?
What pros and cons could be given about staying with STV vs. switching to SPAV?
-
RE: What Multiwinner Method To Push For Local Boards?
@toby-pereira said in What Multiwinner Method To Push For Local Boards?:
SPAV
Thanks for the suggestion. I agree about ease of understanding how to carry it out, especially given the flowchart.
-
RE: Approval Voting as a Workable Compromise
@lime said in Approval Voting as a Workable Compromise:
I basically agree, but I think we should probably try to squeeze out at least a "Combined approval voting" (-1, 0, 1) option to make Burr candidates a bit less harmful.
In that case, I hope the default is -1.
-
What Multiwinner Method To Push For Local Boards?
For a county board of supervisors, for example, what's a nice simple multiwinner system to suggest? It should be easy to explain and sell to skeptical local politicians. I suppose it should be either PR or nearly PR, but I'm not very educated about multiwinner systems, so I'm asking for opinions on what would be good to sell and, but also pretty decent to see in use. The community I want to talk to has used STV, I think.
-
RE: Smith // Score
I need to study the Smith set more and the algorithms, or at least one of them.
-
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.
-
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?
-
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.
-
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
-
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:
...
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.