Best posts made by Keith Edmonds

We knew it was true in theory but it is always nice to see real data showing how IRV is not up to standard.

https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4411173

Is there a place which lists the moderators, admins and such for https://www.votingtheory.org/? It would be good to have transparency about the people who helped to make this and their relevant affiliations.

@jack-waugh This appears to be the Venetian system
https://www.rangevoting.org/VenHist.html

I would make the same suggestion. Add this example to the score voting page.
https://electowiki.org/wiki/Score_voting

A common tactic of the rank voting supporters is to say that cardinal system are not used anywhere.

@micahscopes said in Hello from Micah:

I'm especially excited about "cardinal voting systems".

I have found that everybody ends up there eventually

@Jack-Waugh What STAR does is it renormalizes everybodies vote weight to give them the same impact. This is an attempt to reduce the amount of strategy needed. I do not think that it would outperform somebody who used optimal strategy with score. The point is that most people do not or cannot use optimal strategy. STAR then puts people bad at strategy on a closer level to those who are good at strategy. So I do not think you are wrong in what you say. If all people where fully informed, rational and strategic then score would likely be better. However, people are not any of those things in general. I do not think your like of argument will hold up under this consideration.

An example of where score produces a better outcome than score is

40% = A:5 B:0 C:0
31% = A:0 B:5 C:1
29% = A:0 B:1 C:5

Score give A and STAR gives B. This is an engineered and somewhat extreme example to illustrate the issue. Is 5 infinitely more than 0 or just 5. Is 5 weighted as 4 more than 1 or 5 times. There is no universal metric and different people will choose different metrics. STAR normalizes it all away and compares the two most favoured with full weight to each voter.

STAR is a simplified version of Baldwin's Method. When you think about it that way you see the intent.

@rob

I am pretty sure it is already independent of EqualVote so it makes no sense to say they control it. I was on the board to help it get set up and pushed for this. Unless things have changed the forum is self led democratically with bylaws and all the proper things in place. I think you are confusing "being led by EqualVote" with "the board sharing several people with EqualVote". The community of people who actually do stuff is quite small. Sara set up the up a lot of the process for this to happen and is the best equipped person in the space to do it.

Do you have an issue with people from EqualVote spending their time on this? Are you on the board? Perhaps you could propose a regulation that no more than 50% of the EqualVote board is on the board of another organization. I am not sure who is on the board now so I do not know if that is currently violated but if there is concern that the forum's board lacks impartiality then something like that would make sense.

You say "considering that we are not even listed on their web site" but I went to the website and found it under "resources" in like 30 seconds.

Another complaint is that a board member is non-responsive. There is likely a requirement for them to participate in board-meetings to keep their status. If you think their should be a requirement for board member to respond on the forum in a timely manner that seems reasonable. Join the board and make a motion for something like that.

If you do not want the money for the forum to come from EqualVote I am sure nobody would object to you paying the bills.

It seems that you want to make changes. Great. Propose them to the board. Or better yet, join the board. If you want to run the forum then run for the president (or whatever the title is) of the board. Sara set all this up so there is a very high standard for the procedure to do this. Just like there is for making the changes to the policy I listed above.

You suggest not having meetings. That never works. Discussions on the details are great to have outside of the meetings but to finalize and do stuff democratically requires some formality.

@Marylander Modern cardinal multiwinner methods. I do not think he has ever looked into even the older ones like RRV. Otherwise why does he never mention them?

Here is another good article

https://psephomancy.medium.com/a-majority-of-voters-1d990a53b089

@Jack-Waugh The word strategy appears several times on that page. I do not now exactly how he coded the different strategies but I figure that could help you on your way to doing research.

I am unaware of any property called "the balance condition" and electowiki does not have such a page. Do you intend to refer to The Test of Balance given here. If so I think what you are saying is that in Nash equilibrium two systems which pass this criteria should behave such that the strategy of different factions cancel each other out and they both produce the same winner. The flaw in that logic is the assumption of an underlying symmetry in the size of groups and how that interacts with compromise/utilitarian or majoritarian winners. As I said above, STAR is majoritarian and Score is Utilitarian. In the absence of strategy these systems will give different winners. So even if all the strategy cancelled you would not expect the same winners.

@frenzed Welcome. This is a topic I have thought about before. I do not like voting for parties as a rule so I have not bothered to put time into it. I do however I have an idea how to fix this properly. I put a longer explanation on the other post.

@frenzed If the goal is exact PR then why even have a threshold. I thought we did not want exact PR.

But more on topic I think you are making 2 assumptions you do not know you are making. You assume at all existing parties are independent and uncorrelated. More mathematically, the assumption is that the parties form an orthogonal basis for a political space. This is quite clearly false and I hope I do not need to explain why.

Secondly, by having all of a voters endorsement put towards one party you are preventing exact PR. In fact I would think that in general this effect is larger than the effect you are brining up here. To do this properly you would need to know the vector representation of each voter in the space defined by the parties. Having that you could calculated exact PR.

@SaraWolk said in Successive Rank Voting:

All voting methods which pass Later No Harm fail Favorite Betrayal Criteria,

Also worth pointing out that you must have "later No Harm" (non-compromising) or the chicken dilemma. Later no harm can cause you to get the wrong winner when everybody is honest but Chicken Dilemma stratigies only have pay off if the strategy is used effectively and can also cost you. In STAR the cost of the alternative vs the favorite is 1/5. ie if you want to minimally score a lesser evil you would give them a 1. This makes the chicken dilemma 5 times less incentivized than in Approval.

If you want to take this to the extreme you could argue that giving the lesser evil 1/5 of our favorite is too much. We could do STAR on a [0,100] scale or even more. Clearly this would allow more expression at the cost of complexity. If it was a zero to 1 million then I am sure your complaint about STAR would vanish. Fundamentally I do not think your issue is with STAR itself but in this one scenario where 5-STAR is not expressive enough. Where is the line where you would make a cut off on the ganularity?

@cfrank Score is not Majoritarian. It is Utilitarian.

Score is Utilitarian but does not adjust voter impact to reduce strategic incentives. STAR is Majoritarian but does adjust voter impact to reduce strategic incentives. I played with this issue a lot and came to the compromise that STLR voting was the best tradeoff.

https://electowiki.org/wiki/STLR_voting

Its also worth noting that some people actually prefer Majoritarian systems and think that the tyranny of the majority is justified. Many of these people are the IRV supporters. This makes STAR more desirable to them and therefor a good system to campaign for strategically.

@dave Welcome.

I made a post about SMDPR a few days back. It is here

https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/159/smdpr

Things like utility variance or fraction of electorate with/without a winner among their top choices work to a point, but do not seem particularly theoretically motivated.

If you look at some of the metrics I used in this simulation from the last Equal Vote Committee you will see that I used such metrics. This may be a non-solvable problem for 3 reasons:

• First if there was a metric to maximize we could just make a system that tried all permutations and take the one which maximised the metric. Warren Smith attempted to find such a method here but gave up.
• Secondly, PR has historically been about representing parties fairly not representing people fairly. Even if you came up with a good metric people would fight you on it.
• Lastly, there are theories for the party list case what show that you cant have it all. For example the Balinski–Young theorem. Winner set stability is likely the best definition of PR but it does not always have a solution. There may literally be no answer.

. I could be interested in contributing. Would that look like more simulations or trying to axiomatically characterize these methods or both?

Honestly, since it would be all volunteer it up to you. The mandate last time was to come up with a PR system for Equal Vote to endorse. We ended up with Allocated Score but some of the reasons for that are not 100% proven. Any evidence towards the goal of justifying what the best system is would be great. If you are not a coder or a mathematician there is still lots to do. I would love somebody to write up some of the results for publication.

Simulations can be great tools but one thing I've found is that they frequently have so many tuneable parameters that just by changing a few numbers you can benefit one voting rule or another...

Agreed. There are ways around that but in the end simulations never represent reality. Actual mathematical proofs are better but tend to lack applicability.

Anyway, if you are interested write to Sara (sara@equal.vote) and I(keith@equal.vote).

I am not much of an expert on Ordinal systems since failing monotonicity is a deal breaker for me but I do have a few comments

• You say that it finds the "least-polarizing candidate (in the Schwartz set)" which is a good thing and also that it has later-no-harm which I think is a bad thing. Later-no-harm means that no compromise was made and no compromise means that it is majoritarian (ie polarizing). Clearly this does not get the "least-polarizing candidate" overall so what is the importance of getting the least-polarizing candidate (in the Schwartz set)?
• I am not sure what you mean by "Find the instant-runoff voting (IRV) winners" in the procedure. Should it not be "Find the instant-runoff voting (IRV) winner" in the singular?
• I see no evidence for the claim that it is immune to dishonest strategy. Furthermore, I would not know how to rigorously classify dishonest strategy only strategy.
• I agree that it is better than standard IRV because it removes some situations where it would get the wrong winner. However, this does look more like a patch than a consistent system. In my experience, such systems often have holes.

@Jack-Waugh STAR should be invited

@denis-falvey Welcome.

the logic of my objective measures of democracy and local representation,

Do you have documentation on this in something succinct. You may have trouble getting people interested in reading a longer form essay specific to a Country. If you have short summaries of these objective measure please provide a link.

If you do not have such documentation, electowiki.org/ would be a great place to put it. There already exists a page for the concept of Proportionate Representation which is important in the Canadian Constitution.

https://electowiki.org/wiki/Proportionate_representation

Is this what your measure of local representation is quantifying? If not there are several others
https://electowiki.org/wiki/Category:Types_of_representation

But how should score ballots be interpreted in the context of proportional representation?

There is a whole electowiki page about this topic. https://electowiki.org/wiki/Cardinal_PR

what are the natural extensions of the axioms for proportional approval?

I spent some time on this a while ago. The claim was that RRV was the natural extension of SPAV which maintained the Thiele ethos. I don't think that is true so I invented a new system to show what should be done.
https://electowiki.org/wiki/Single_distributed_vote

I know there has been a little bit of discussion around questions like this in the context of Sequentially Spent Score whether to use scaling or capping, but I have not yet seen a satisfying conclusion.

I agree and I invented SSS. I feel like capping is more true to the philosophy but scaling gets better results in some specific examples. The Philosophy of vote unitarity is incomplete. It was a counter point to Parkers Sequential Monroe Voting which tried to do what STV does but with score. The "give my vote 100% to as a high a choice of mine as will benefit me" philosophy seems like it would polarize so I did not like it. SSS is intended to be unpolarized.

I am trying to get the authors of this paper to opensouce their code so we can test more systems for bias

In general, there is a ton of existing literature on proportional elections with approval ballots and I'd really like to know what results carry over or what to expect from proportional scored elections.

This is the absolute cutting edge of research. Equal vote is planning on forming another committee to tackle this topic. Would you have time and ability to contribute? I have still not found the time to publish the findings of the first committee because I am too busy with Canadian PR Campaigns.

Another question to answer is how to compare the amount of PR accross systems. Galligher index is bad but what is the non-partisan alternative. My preference would be to base it in Winner Set Stability but I do not know how to do that. Also, what is the level of PR for single winner systems. Does STAR give higher PR than FPTP? look at this post.
https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/101/what-level-of-pr-do-different-systems-get?_=1643416428211

@marylander Yes, yes it should. Also adding the cardinal versions since the existing page only has the approval definitions.