Topics created by Lime

@jack-waugh said in On one-sided strategy:

@lime said in On one-sided strategy:

@jack-waugh said in On one-sided strategy:

Give your favorites the top score and your most hated the bottom score. If you have a compromise candidate, and if you are convinced that your favorites are very unpopular or unknown, exaggerate the score of the compromise candidate almost up to the next higher candidates, but not quite up to them.

In practice, this is the same as thresholding, assuming you rate your compromise close enough to perfect.

What you mean, "rate"? In my heart, or on my ballot?

On your ballot.

@chocopi said in New voting method: Linear medians:

As part of an experiment to see if it's possible for the Democrats to hate someone more than Trump, or just to set a Guinness World Record for biggest political career implosion?

I didn't say it would be a good idea. As I mentioned, he'd have no hope, since voters are using the primary to settle on an equilibrium. The question is whether Democrats have a gun to their head that would keep them from voting for Buttigieg's third-party, even if Biden looked hopeless.

@chocopi said in New voting method: Linear medians:

I agree more with you that these edge cases can plausibly be disregarded. The very idea of anyone executing a pushover strategy is absurd--you would need exact polling, exact coordination, no counter-strategy, and face a worst-case backfire if you get any of that wrong.

I don't think voters supporting a pushover is where this really falls apart. The problem with Tideman's framework is the strategies he finds are often:

Individually unstable, and therefore couldn't occur with strategic voters. You need voters to do things like betray a favorite, even though that favorite has a good shot at winning. Sometimes they're impossible to pull off with imperfect coordination (improper equilibria, i.e. trembling-hands rule them out). Prosocial or neutral—FPP has lots of opportunities for strategy, which is a good thing, because without strategy it turns into a random lottery. Easily countered by basic defensive strategy.

Every voting system has strategy. The real concern is whether voters playing their optimal strategy creates a bad result, e.g. a turkey winning. After all, in Borda, the Strong Nash equilibrium is still the Condorcet winner, but that doesn't happen in real elections. The reason Borda is bad is because the only proper equilibrium ends up selecting a winner at random.

In Benham's method, optimal strategy looks like a center-squeeze, because whenever you have a center-squeeze setup, the largest faction can bury the Condorcet winner and elect a candidate on the wings. (That's especially true if the wings tend to be overconfident.) By contrast, in cardinal methods, the optimal strategy looks like, well, the Condorcet winner being elected.

I'd like to clarify that I think party strategy does play a huge role in FPP, IRV, or Condorcet elections, because strategy is either too complex for typical voters or there are many equilibria (and voters have to coordinate on just one). In these specific situations, voters have to follow instructions on voting cards issued by their party. In approval or score, any idiot with a pulse can work out that your best strategy is to give as many points as possible to the best frontrunner.

@chocopi said in New voting method: Linear medians:

Baldwin's is a ying-yang similarity, a method that is practically only impacted by said esoteric NP-hard strategies. (Simple compromise-burial does almost nothing.) These non-trivial Baldwin strategies are the hardest to calculate of any method, even with perfect [everything]. I think it's a fair and interesting academic question to quantify these, but I'd also raise an eyebrow (or two) at anyone listing them as a point against Baldwin's.

This is a good example of why "NP-hard"ness results are not very useful in practice. What matters is what happens if voters execute their ideal strategy. For Baldwin's method, the strategy is an absolute disaster, just like for Borda: it ends in a turkey winning with high probability.

In practice, elections have 2-5 viable candidates, so even "NP-hard" manipulation is trivial in practice. If you have just 2 candidates and a turkey, Baldwin is Borda-with-runoff, with a simple strategy: bury the leader to make sure they can't make it out of the first round. Does this have a shot of backfiring? Yes. (It has a good shot of picking a turkey, in fact.) But at its core, it's still Borda, and has the same result.

@lime said in Simple anti-chicken modifications to score:

I promise you that nobody in the election-methods mailing list is particularly positive on IRV.

Yes, I have noticed that.

Most of the support for IRV is from the Alaskan model (Top Four & Final Five) proponents and their ally Fair Vote.

Fair Vote is promoting Proportional Racked Choice Voting in the Fair Representation Act (Rep. Donald Beyer, D-VA-8).

The Fair Representation Act (FRA) calls for Ranked Proportional Voting (SVT), FairVote claims:

"It’s straightforward for voters: Rank candidates in order of choice. Voters can rank as many candidates as they want, without fear that doing so will hurt their favorite candidate’s chances. Ranking a backup choice will never hurt a voter’s favorite candidate, so voters have no reason to vote for only one candidate."

This year's version of the FRA includes provisions for states with blanket primaries.

As with previous versions, FRA protects Voting Right Act of 1965 set aside districts. Frankly I think fair voting systems, especially proportional representation, will help minorities far more than set aside districts. Set aside districts are perceived by Republicans as a perfectly legitimate excuse to gerrymander like all hell.

The FairVote FRA pages give the impression the the chief purpose of proportional representation is to get more people of color, women, LGBTQ candidates elected.

To get Proportional Representation enacted we will need support from a good number of conservatives and Republicans. We should sell voting system reforms as color blind (they are), and fair. They will help minority representation by virtue of being color blind.

The FRA is now in committee, the speaker will decide when to let it out of committee, smart money is on never.

@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 registration—e.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 effect—generally, 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.

@lime said in MDD//Score:

eliminate any candidate who would lose in a runoff

If that's what it amounts to, then maybe a restatement of the definition in terms of predicting such a runoff would make the definition easier to read for a broad and skeptical audience.

@lime you could also have a persistence diagram that shows the support level of each candidate at every possible cutoff. This produces “score proportion” profiles that indicate the fraction of voters who score each candidate at least a given score. It’s possible to define a dynamic threshold or even an integral across all thresholds.

@lime
Thank you for the clarification.

This brings to mind the question I posed in "STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters"
Does STLR maintain enough the criterion compliance of Score to justify the STLR's extra complexity?

In related news, it looks like ranked pairs satisfies participation when there are at most 3 candidates in the Smith set (where it reduces to Minimax). See here for why 3-candidate Minimax is participation-consistent. This can fail for Minimax, though, because it fails ISDA.

@lime I don’t think any of the points are actually valid except the last one, with the addendum that Democratic representatives are just as likely to stall or derail voting reform efforts, because they also benefit directly from lack of accountability to public interests.

@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 cores—the 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).

@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 On a ranked ballot you can't show if a 2nd choice is as good as a 1st choice or as bad as a last choice. In practice, ranked methods have to constrain how many candidates can be ranked. There are a few different ways you can look at it, but here's why I think it's the most expressive on the table (excluding cardinal methods with a bigger range)

the ability to vote on every candidate no matter how many there are, The ability to show preference order The ability to show degree of support on a 6 rating scale.