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

@sarawolk said in Tweet by Star Voting regarding Multi Winner Voting:

Equal Vote as an org doesn't endorse any systems that don't eliminate vote-splitting and/or that waste ballot data, so MMP and STV don't pass our minimum bar but 'terrible' is a strong word. There are clearly pros and cons.

Hi Sara,

Point of clarification. My quote labels Party List and Single Member Plurality as terrible not MMP. I don't think that is too strong of a work for them (speak as me not as a director of equal vote. MMP is mediocre.

@spelunker said in Tweet by Star Voting regarding Multi Winner Voting:

I would be interested, do you have a forum pointer?

There have been lots of discussions about this stuff. There was a bit of a revival when MES was invented a few years back. I am sure some of them were had here. Ill Leave it to @Andy-Dienes to go into the details of explaining it. If you would like to get it from the source here are a few papers to get you started.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.01795.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.11747.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.01527.pdf

@spelunker said in Tweet by Star Voting regarding Multi Winner Voting:

I see, I don't think we will be able to agree, if that is your opinion.

We could get to agree if I had enough time to talk about the game theoretic effects of explicitly partisan system and how they undermine democracy. I do not have time for that so I will just leave you with a thought experiment. Would you rather have your favourite system where your enemy gets to choose who is on the ballot or your least favourite system where anybody can appear on the ballot? What effect does the choice of system have on who is on the ballot?

@spelunker I think it is fine for Equal Vote to have a high bar for what they endorse and do not see how you could view this as "dangerous".

Most of the axioms have to do with the definition of PR. The ones I care about have to do with how you interpret the different scores on a ballot. This gives the distinction between MES and SSS. @Andy-Dienes went super far down the rabbit hole on this if you want to ask him a follow up.

One axiom relevant to this conversation is if a vote for a person who is a member of a party can be assumed to be endorsement of that party. MMP is built off the axiom that they are the same. This is why I think MMP is a bad system. I do not think partisan voting is good at all and especially not with a choose one ballot. I view Party List as the worst possible system not Single Member Plurality.

@rob I have two major points here.

1. I thought this forum was set up with a board who would make policy decisions such as those you have proposed. @SaraWolk does such a board not exist? If you want to take over the technical responsibilities of the forum, have the forum adopt an official stance on electoral methods or disband the board I would think that the proper place to bring it up would be to the board. I think the method you have taken seems undemocratic and the appearance is important. At a bear minimum you could have called for a vote on this from the people on the forum. At least then it would look more like a populist upraising to overthrow the government instead of a coup. I know you are not going for this but again it is about appearance to people like me who are not in the weeds on the running of this forum. And I am a lot further down in the weeds than some her.

2. I would be strongly opposed to limiting any discussion on any topic that is at least somewhat related to electoral reform. It is not really clear to me that IRV is better than plurality in the objective sense. Its like choosing between burning and freezing to death to me. Both seem bad but in opposing and hard to compare ways so why choose? Would this opinion of mine being honestly held be banned on this forum? I recently had a conversation with David Deutsch where he expressed a similar but different sentiment. He wrote a whole chapter about it in one of his books. Are you proposing that if a famous professor started debating with us here we should ban his point of view?

@spelunker I don't remember saying that but I does seem like something I would say. Both of the criticism of the systems are accurate. If the simplification of the criticism does not sit right with you because it is too simplistic then why not ask for details if you do not have them? The nature of public communication is that of condensing concepts.

@Toby-Pereira is right that I prefer Sequentially Spent Score to Allocated Score but I do like it. I also like MES and Single distributed vote. There are lots of good systems out there and there are trade-offs between them. In the end it comes down to your position on a few axioms. However, MMP and STV are not good systems and I do not see how they could be on anybody's list of top tier systems independent of axiom choice.

Also, a side note, you are inserting a pretty bold assumption about the motivation for the invention of these systems. None of these system were invented by people who were involved with STAR voting at the time of their invention as far as I know. You are thinking there is causation from STAR voting to the multiwinner system when you should be looking for a common cause. The common cause is that cardinal systems contain the maximal amount of ballot data. The choice of 5 is somewhat arbitrary but seems a reasonable choice. I do not think anybody involved in STAR voting or other Cardinal systems has a super strong opinion on the granularity.

@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.

I agree with @Sass and @SaraWolk on this. So I will not reiterate their comments.

I think this forum is needed. When the CES shut down their forum I was one of the people who pushed for this to be created. I also pushed for it to not be run by Equal Vote. I wanted it to be more like electowiki.org. Independent of any of the think tanks or lobby groups. I want EqualVote to push people to discuss on the forum but I do not want it to be though of as EqualVote's forum. I think it is moving in that direction and that makes me happy.

I think we just need it to grow. I am happy to let Rob take over the leadership of the forum. However, I do have one condition. He has to stop bashing EqualVote. Again I would point to EqualVotes relationship with electowiki.org. The Rob (@robla) who runs that has a great relationship with EqualVote and there is a large overlap between the contributors to both organizations. Having a Rob (@rob ) running this would be great. EqualVote is a coalition of organizations and people with a shared goal. A forum is a needed part of this coalition. I do not like Reddit so I don't post there almost ever. I would rather people come to this forum.

Does anybody want to go here today to tell them that partisan voting and ranking is not going to lower polarization?

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_1CuGeJwbQN2ozR3EnzM2eg

@andy-dienes Awesome. Pandas definitely can make things concise if done right. There are lots of functions.

@andy-dienes said in Threshold MES:

Added a Julia implementation to the electowiki page. If people want it in Python I can translate.

My preference is python with heavy use of the pandas library. This should help it be short an clean. Or at leas shorter than what you have there. We do not really want production code but a very precise definition.

@andy-dienes OK that is what I would have expected. I think this is now my second favourite system (second to SSS but we do not need to side-track). It meets the basic criteria I look for

• It is simple enough to be explained in a referendum to laypeople
• It has an underlying ethos which makes sense. It is not the linear utilities like SSS but it is reasonable and consistent.
• It gives a high level of proportionality
• It gives good voter expression (ie cardinal ballots)

Unless there is a large flaw I am missing (like nonmonotonicity) I think you should run it past experts who are not on here (ie Piotr and Jameson) to see if they have comments.

It is quite similar to Sequential Monroe Voting so I would take a good look at that. The two finalists in the last Committee on voting methods was this and SSS. Allocated score was sort of reinvented as a compromise between the two.

Possible names for this system

• Threshold Allocation Voting
• Proportional Threshold Selection
• Something else with the words Proportional, Threshold, Allocation, Justified.

OK good. It does not seem to have that issue. Thanks for humouring me, I could not quite remember the reason for not wanting to order by original score

@andy-dienes said in Threshold MES:

BBBAB

I would think this is the better result but whatever. To explore this I find the following example which I often refer to illustrative.

@keith-edmonds said in Rule X extended to score ballots:

Consider this 5 winner example with clones for each candidate
Red: 61% vote A:5, B:3, C:0
Blue: 39% vote A:0, B:3, C:5

RRV Gives ['A1', 'C1', 'A2', 'B1', 'B2']
MES Gives ['A1', 'A2', 'A3', 'C1', 'B1']
SSS Gives ['A1', 'B1', 'B2', 'B3', 'B4']
Allocated score Gives ['A1', 'B1', 'A2', 'B2', 'A3']
STV Gives ['A1', 'A2', 'A3', 'C1', 'C2']

What does your new system give?

@andy-dienes I understand that it is an allocation method so it is all or nothing unless on the split point. I also understand that you want to charge them all the same cost when it is on a split point.

I was thinking that a voter with a ballot weight 0.4 will contribute that 0.4 weight to all candidates they score a 5, BUT the 5 would be sequenced as 2. This means a person who scored the same candidate 3 would be taken first. There is a strategic issue around this but I don't recall the details. We encountered it when designing Allocated score. I suggest you look into the issue. It is linked on electowiki here but the link is broken since the CES forum has been taken down.

@andy-dienes said in Threshold MES:

The disadvantage would be that it respects linear / additive utility much less; for example it will not necessarily choose the score winner (although in practice probably will) and the distribution of utility (again, assuming it is linearly additive over sets) is not as proportional as in regular MES.

Does the system lower the threshold in integer increments? In later rounds the score could be a fraction.

I do like this system a lot and it is simple enough to be viable. It reminds me a bit of Sequential Monroe. I do not think Threshold MES is really the best name.

@andy-dienes I like this system. Is there a clear disadvantage to regular MES? There is a pretty clear simplicity advantage.

Please correct me if either of the following is wrong

• The subtracted voting power is done as "scaling" to the rest of the ballot
• The threshold will always decrease as sub sequent winners are elected.

@toby-pereira OK, makes sense. The one round run off version of that is STAR and the every round run off is Cardinal Baldwin. Presumably you prefer this because it maximizes voter influence. I invented STLR specifically to avoid that as it leads to majoritarianism.

It seems there are (at least) three types. This one. The one STLR uses. And the one for IRNR and Distributed Voting

I propose that these should all be consider them all the same class for this poll. Do you agree? Wanna suggest a name? I gave one above.

@toby-pereira On the contrary. I agree with all your points and you will get no wrath. I have purposely not attempted to gain traction for STLR since STAR is the better choice for lobbying.

I think it would be best to have a class containing IRNR, Cardinal Baldwin, STLR and other reweighting methods. Brian Olson, Aldo Tragni, myself and some others have put a lot of time into the development of this class. STAR is technically in this class but it is on the edge of it. For that and reasons I mentioned before STAR should stand alone.

While we are on the topic, if you consider the reweighting method of STLR to be misguided then by extension you would also consider cardinal Baldwin to be misguided. Is there a reweighting system which you think if better?

@rob I would put them in the same class as STLR and STAR.... I think. They are all directed towards trying to reweight the scores as you eliminate losers.

STAR and STLR do it for the final round while several others do it at each round. The cost of doing it a each round is that you lose monotonicity and there is a fair bit of added complexity. In my mind they all have the same intent so it would be fair to put them together. "reweighted cardinal run-off methods" or something like that would be a reasonable name.

All that said, It would be a shame to lump all such systems of varying quality together with a frontrunner like STAR. Could I propose that commonly used systems like Approval, STAR and IRV stand alone while other systems with no lobby behind them get grouped?

@rob Thank you for including STLR. I do still advocate for this system. I think it is better than STAR but I do not think it is viable in the current climate of voting reform for a number of reasons. I favour STAR publicly.

Which class are sequential elimination reweighted systems like Cardinal Baldwin and IRNR? STAR and STLR may be better to be paired as a single auto run-off class.

rc-i[0] rc-c[2] c-c[6] star[9] appr[7] score[9] stlr[10] c-med[3] c-o[1]