@toby-pereira said in Entropy-Statistic-Weighted Approval Voting:
While I don't think it would be a good method in practice
The 2 most popular voting systems in practice are IRV and plurality. Anything is a good method in practice
@toby-pereira said in Entropy-Statistic-Weighted Approval Voting:
While I don't think it would be a good method in practice
The 2 most popular voting systems in practice are IRV and plurality. Anything is a good method in practice
@cfrank said in What does STAR Voting do when 2nd place is tied?:
If we were being engineers about choosing a high quality candidate to win the election, we could even compute the distribution of scores, take the candidates whose scores exceed some elbow point, and find the Condorcet winner among those candidates with the top scoring candidate as the backup if no Condorcet winner exists. Thatâs basically a generalization of STAR with a dynamic front-runner selection method.
What about a 50% cutoff? That would also dramatically reduce the incentive for turkey-raisingâno point in pushing up a bad candidate to help them make the runoff, since now that doesn't eliminate another contender.
@toby-pereira said in Easy-to-explain Proportional (Multiwinner) elections:
By the way, Satisfaction Approval Voting can only be described as semi-proportional. You're wasting part of your vote on candidates that aren't elected. It's like SNTV except that you can split your vote up. They both have similar problems to FPTP.
They might be easy to explain, but they're not worth explaining!
You're right, of course, but that's why I like to bring up SAV as an "obvious" system with an obvious flaw (spoilers). Then I explain how PAV/SPAV fix that flaw with a minor change--split a vote only after a candidate is elected, not before.
@toby-pereira said in The dangers of analysis paralysis in voting reform:
Also for a score-based method, I'm still not convinced that STAR is the method. I said on the Election Methods list the other day that while basically all methods fail Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA), STAR seems to do so in a more wilful way. I'll just quote myself:
That's kind of interesting, because I took you as saying the opposite (which is also my understanding of STAR): that STAR doesn't have to fail IIA (or clone-independence), but intentionally chooses to do so because this leads to a slightly better outcome. With STAR, the optimal strategy is for every party to run 2 candidates, which gives every voter at least two choices they can feel comfortable with.
As an example, I'd much prefer a situation where both Biden and Kamala Harris were listed separately on the ballot so I could rank Harris higher (and help her win the runoff). Right now, I'm not happy with any of the candidates in the race; on a simple left-right scale I'm close to Biden, but I disapprove of him for reasons of competence. (But I'm sure as hell not supportive of any other candidate...) With STAR, every voter should have at least two choices they consider tolerable.
Personally, I think of STAR as just reversing the primary-then-general order: we have a general election to choose the best party (the score round), and then a "primary" where we pick the best nominee by majority vote.
@masiarek said in "Problematic" Ballot Exhaustion examples - RCV IRV:
We need three small, illustrative elections to demonstrate each âproblematicâ box separately (avoid âLess Problematicâ Exhausted Ballots).
Really I'd just hammer IRV over and over again on participation failure. Exhausted ballots are a non-issue.
We need to find better names than "monotonicity" and "participation" that are easy to explain. Monotonicity is a complicated six-syllable word that, in everyday speech, literally means "boringness"âno wonder nobody cares. Rename it the basic @#$%ing sanity criterion.
Advertisement: a candidate is declared the winner and starts celebrating; then somebody comes up and explains they've found extra votes for the candidate, and the candidate suddenly loses. End with "Last year, Nick Begich lost the Alaska election because voting authorities thought he had too many votes. How could voting for someone make them lose? Don't let it happen here. Vote no on IRV."
I'd just like to say this looks great and I'm very interested in seeing more! Quantile-normalization like this is very common in statistics. This has one especially nice advantageâit eliminates the "arbitrary number" criticism often made of score voting, which is that voters can assign arbitrary scales to their feelings of support/opposition for candidates that might not line up. Quantile normalization gives an equivalent, statistically well-defined scale for every voter.
@sarawolk said in The dangers of analysis paralysis in voting reform:
@toby-pereira said in The dangers of analysis paralysis in voting reform:
Ranked Robin
We are planning to come back to the original intention around Ranked Robin, which is to stop branding Condorcet as a whole bunch of systems to fight between, and move to calling them one system, Ranked Robin, with a variety of "tie breaking protocols" a jurisdiction's special committee on niche election protocols could choose between. Honestly, specifying Copeland vs RP vs Minimax is way beyond the level of detail that should even be written into the election code or put to the voters.
Equal Vote's point with the Ranked Robin was never to say that Copeland is better than Ranked Pairs is better than Smith/Minimax. The point is that these are all equivalent in the vast, vast majority of scaled elections and that Condorcet as a whole is top shelf so it should be presented to voters as a better ranked ballot option. Ranked voting advocates should support it. The main reason Condorcet is not seriously considered is because of analysis paralysis and a total lack of interest in branding and marketing for simplicity and accessibility.
So then "Ranked Robin" is just supposed to refer to Condorcet methods in general?
I think that's a good strategy, but the presentation on the website made me think that Ranked Robin means Copeland//Borda specifically.
2 years later
I think Saari showed in his book that Cycle Cancellation//Condorcet is equivalent to Borda!
q-Condorcet methods use quotas other than 50% to declare a Condorcet winner; for example, a 2/3-Condorcet method declares a candidate to be the winner if they defeat every other candidate by a margin of 2/3. By Nakamura's theorem, the q-Condorcet winner is guaranteed to be acyclic for all voter profiles if and only if q = (n_candidates - 1) / n_candidates
. The same quota also guarantees that a q-Condorcet method is participation-consistent.
Working on this more. Right now I have some interesting questions, like: What if q depends on the number of ballots involved in cycles? Could some method satisfy Condorcet-like properties for a "mostly acyclic" electorate, but otherwise fall back on some other method? And do so in a way that still satisfies participation?
This seems like a nice way to smoothly interpolate between Condorcet and non-Condorcet methods (like score), depending on whether the optimality criteria for Condorcet are satisfied.
@toby-pereira said in Cycle Cancellation//Condorcet:
One thing you could do is look at every possible triple separately (similar to how Condorcet looks at pairs separately). So within each triple you remove cycles and get the pairwise comparisons for the candidates within that. Then you could do some sort of Ranked Pairs or Rivers process to "lock in" certain triples, but it's a case of deciding how to judge which are the ones to lock in first.
OK, having read more about split-cycle, I think I've come to the conclusion that simple cycles (i.e. a path that starts and ends at A, without repeating any points other than A) are more likely to work than triples. An explanations of split-cycle:
Consider a simple cycle. Affirm all defeats in this cycle other than the weakest. Repeat for all possible simple cycles.
So, it's a kind of local minimax.
So you can restrict yourself to a single simple cycle at a time, and maybe consider within this group who the local winners are?
@jack-waugh said in 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.
The Essential set almost-always has 3 candidates, so the method can be made 3rd-order summable except when the election gets ridiculously close.
@cfrank said in What does STAR Voting do when 2nd place is tied?:
If we were being engineers about choosing a high quality candidate to win the election, we could even compute the distribution of scores, take the candidates whose scores exceed some elbow point, and find the Condorcet winner among those candidates with the top scoring candidate as the backup if no Condorcet winner exists. Thatâs basically a generalization of STAR with a dynamic front-runner selection method.
What about a 50% cutoff? That would also dramatically reduce the incentive for turkey-raisingâno point in pushing up a bad candidate to help them make the runoff, since now that doesn't eliminate another contender.
I don't think that reply addressed any of my concerns. I'm worried about STAR's potential for turkey-raising. It's completely possible that STAR is great at avoiding favorite-betrayal, reduces the rate of LNH violations, and does lots of other good things, but is still vulnerable to turkey-raising (later-no-help violations).
@sarawolk said in Simple anti-chicken modifications to score:
When will we stop ignoring the forest for the trees and recognize that both have important pieces of the puzzle and that a hybrid approach like STAR makes more sense than telling people that their concerns are invalid.
Smith//Score is a hybrid approach just like STAR, by the way, and I offered several other hybrid approaches that could improve on STAR in my post.
STAR has been extremely divisive on the EM-list. Lots of people have some very harsh things to say about it. This wasn't just the usual jockeying from perfectionists, and I think I've come around to the other EM-listers on this. The opposition to STAR seems to be common to both cardinal and Condorcet supporters. Everyone seems to agree either Smith//Score or plain Score would be better than STAR.
Most of these criticisms boil down to STAR managing to break every criterion in the book. Adding a runoff destroys favorite betrayal, later-no-help, participation, . It does this in to try and prevent a strategic voting dilemma that:
Personally, I was supportive of STAR until @SaraWolk's comment about the possibility of candidates not running in cloned pairs made me think through its potential turkey-raising problems. Burt Monroe has argued (very convincingly, in my opinion) that any system that fails turkey-raising will eventually be repealed. It doesn't matter that the expected value of a strategy is negative: empirically, parties push turkey-raising strategies even in systems where risks of blowback are extremely strong, e.g. the Democratic party's support for extreme Republican nominees in primaries, or their refusal to put up an alternative to Gavin Newsom in the recall.
It's true that criteria are worst-case guarantees, and what we care about is the average case. But for something as complex as a political system, we don't know the average case. Simulations are unrealistic and we've never run elections with STAR. All we know is in the worst case, STAR might do very badly.
If nothing else, these dramatic criteria failures severely limit the possibility of receiving endorsements from economists and social choice theorists. Few, if any, voting theorists who hear about STAR's criteria failures are eager to endorse it.
This leads me to suggest the following alternatives to STAR in its current form, which attempt to eliminate the small (but potentially disastrous) risk of turkey-raising.
@jack-waugh said in Smith // Score:
@lime, but on the other hand, rescaling is not practical, because it would require reexamining the ballots. The people need precinct-summable systems to maintain security against fraud.
Can be done in two passes. The first pass identifies the Smith set, and then a second pass identifies the Score winner.
@gregw said in Top-k primaries might be good?:
@lime said in Top-k primaries might be good?:
(regarding SNTV changes)reserve a spot for the incumbent. Second, assign seats to parties using a rounded-down Hare quota based on party registrationâe.g. if 45% of voters are registered Republicans, and there's 5 candidates on the ballot, 2 of the places go to the first- and second-place finishers on Republican ballots.
I am afraid that this would turn voter registration drives into a major industry. Abuses and mistakes could occur. Misunderstandings caused by language barriers could cause noncitizens to be registered by mistake, they would not know what happened but they could be prosecuted.
Perhaps I exaggerate, but people will pay dearly for any electoral advantage.
Also, a lot of people are not aware of which party the are registered with, if any.
BTW The common term for a payment to an person who gathers voter registrations is called a bounty. So if party R is paying $10 per registration from citizens residing in district x, the bounty for those registrations is $10.
There might be a small advantage to running more candidates (one of them might be a slightly stronger candidate than the others), but I'm guessing this is probably a small effectâgenerally, all the members of a party will do about equally well. There might even be a slight push in the opposite direction, because running more candidates splits funds and volunteer efforts between them. (Besides running the risk of party infighting.)
My guess is parties won't decide to do unethical things for such a small benefit.
@toby-pereira said in Variable house sizes:
Methods that guarantee core stability are of interest to me (see this thread, which I linked to earlier) even if it's not my priority. From what I've read, I think it's still unproven that it's guaranteed that the core is non-empty. But if you use a stability measure (as suggested in the thread) rather than an all-or-nothing, it could be workable regardless.
BTW, we should probably distinguish different-sized coresâthe possibility of an empty Hare core is unknown, but Droop cores can definitely be empty (as the Condorcet paradox proves). What I'm interested in is satisfying the Hare core with high probability and satisfying the anti-Droop core guarantee with certainty; i.e. the share of voters who would prefer some other committee is less than 1 / (seats - 1)
.
@gregw said in State constitutions that require âa plurality of the votesâ or the âhighest,â âlargest,â or âgreatestâ number of votes.:
I agree severability would be the device. The question is can we get away with it? Has anyone used severability on a major feature of a state statute?
Yes, many state laws and include clauses specifying which parts are intended to be severable.
OTOH, jurisprudence has been very clear on rejecting the claim that "one person, one vote" means anything about how elections are conducted, other than requiring all votes to be treated equally.
The term comes from a Supreme Court ruling that congressional districts with different sizes (populations) are unconstitutional, because they egregiously violate the anonymity criterion. See Baker v. Carr.
I'd actually like to see simulations on thisâideally, I'd like a first-stage primary that filters candidates by quality but not ideological fit (which should be almost random to keep representativeness).
SNTV has two nice properties for primaries:
I'd suggest 2 changes. First, reserve a spot for the incumbent. Second, assign seats to parties using a rounded-down Hare quota based on party registrationâe.g. if 45% of voters are registered Republicans, and there's 5 candidates on the ballot, 2 of the places go to the first- and second-place finishers on Republican ballots.
I suggest this as an improvement on approval-with-runoff, if legislators are insistent on having two separate elections. This maintains the desirable properties of approval (unlike approval-with-runoff, which introduces turkey-raising).