Best posts made by Marylander

@jack-waugh We could use tags to retain some of the information lost by cutting the number of categories.

@Jack-Waugh I have to agree with Rob and Keith re: concerns about this being on topic. I had assumed that the Advocacy tab would be about projects directly related to the mission of the forum. A project to generally inform peripheral political actors such as minor parties about the consequences of the election methods that they advocate might be on mission. However, to focus on a single movement seems to mix voting method advocacy with trying to promote participation in that movement. That could turn the Advocacy category into a place for general political advocacy, which I think would be harmful because it could limit the participation of users with ideological views that are divergent from the userbase on topics unrelated to the mission. The Score voting movement cannot afford to be exclusionary.

Now, I can understand being frustrated with the way that the electoral reform movement tends to discuss elections only in the abstract, with little regard to the actual consequences of any of the discussed phenomena. But I think that questions of what to do with the increased political choice associated with Score voting are best left to other political movements.

It's been quite a while since we have held any sort of meeting about the forum. Now, obviously we shouldn't just hold meetings just for the sake of it, but one of the points of some of the later meetings I recall was ensuring that people fill various roles. Some of these people I have not seen here in a long time, i.e. several months to a year. I propose we hold a meeting on the following topics:

• What day-to-day responsibilities have we assigned, and are they currently being filled? If not, do we need to recruit new volunteers?

• What goals had we set for the forum at launch, and have we achieved them?

• What new goals should we have for the forum?

Officially I think we turned 1 year old about a month ago, so it seems like a good time to start planning a meeting like this. I'm not in a huge hurry to hold this meeting, but I do want people thinking about it. People seem quite busy at the moment, so I'll plan for it to happen some time in May.

In this doc you can suggest things to cover at the meeting.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YMhr1PRCKOAeLn4gZ4Nnqhm0dbCNBdfANrl5KF-ctPA/edit?usp=sharing

You don't have to have a leadership position on the forum to attend or make suggestions, but I am specifically notifying the council members.

@cfrank , @micahscopes , @Jack-Waugh , @SaraWolk . (For completion I'll note I am also on the council.)

Also, the Groups page lists which accounts have admin/mod privileges. Since it's tied to the forum software, it will update automatically.

@Jack-Waugh As I said before, I agree that advocating Score voting to social movements is on topic. Indeed, I recall at CES that Sara Wolk discussed projects by Equal Vote to help various political organizations set up Star Voting elections. I will also grant that it might be easier to influence a social movement as a member than as an outsider. However, I don't think that the Advocacy category should be used to recruit people for movements only tangentially related to electoral reform, or that have much broader scopes. Voting reform won't stay at the center of the discussion, because the broad scope of reasons to support or oppose that social movement will necessarily enter the conversation. It might technically stay on topic, but it will be off-focus.

It's worth noting that Lisa Murkowski ran a write-in campaign when she was elected to the Senate in 2010 after losing the Republican primary, so despite the state being quite red they still can have the occasional competitive statewide election. IRV in that race would probably have helped Murkowski more since the Republican nominee was associated with the Tea Party and so the second preferences would've been from Democrats.

@cfrank The strategy is going to end up being the same as FPTP though. It doesn't seem to mix with contexts where the outcomes for candidates are binary (i.e. you're either a winner or a loser) very well.

It seems to make more sense in a context where there is a scarce resource to be distributed, like time given to different speakers. (Perhaps this makes it attractive to economists.)

@cfrank This I'm quite sure is nonmonotonic because raising a candidate from unapproved to the bottom of your list of approved candidates can make a candidate lose a runoff they usually would win.

Consider applying this method to a two-candidate race. You have to approve both candidates for your vote to count.

@rob said in Under what scenarios will the Smith set differ from Copeland set?:

I don't know about your favorite Score - Sorted Margins (I don't see an electowiki page). Would you be interested in helping/advising so I can work it into my Codepens where I am trying to do a bunch of methods that use score-type ballots. (if you are a JS coder, feel free to fork it and add it yourself)

I think it was invented by @Ted-Stern. It uses score ballots. How it works is:
First, find both the total scores for each candidate, and the pairwise matrix for each candidate.
Candidates are seeded by their total score. For each adjacent pair of candidates in the ranking, we check whether their order in the ranking agrees with their pairwise matchup. If each pair agrees, then stop and take this as the final ranking. If at least one pair does not agree, select the pair with the smallest difference in score that disagrees and switch the candidates. Repeat until you end up with a ranking that has no disagreements between adjacent candidates.

@keith-edmonds said in New Thiele-type proportional voting method:

@marylander I do not see what you are getting at. Is that a free riding strategy?

28/75 > 1/3

If you expect to win lots of seats, you can increase your voting power by giving your preferred candidates less than a max score.

The optimal score is (1/2)*(s/(s-1)) where s is the number of seats you think you can win.

Edit: This is a problem because it means that the method will favor larger parties even more so than either standard SPAV or RRV, since this is something that parties need a high seat count to be able to take advantage of. In fact it makes the method not really proportional. For example, with ballots:
4: A[1/2]
1: B[2/2]
Party A will win every seat no matter how many seats there are.

While the most likely outcome of the New York Mayoral election is an uncontroversial win for Eric Adams, especially as he leads first preference polling, and in practice many voters do not use ranking even when the option to do so is provided, some polling has suggested non-monotonic scenarios.

Polling suggests that Eric Adams' worst matchup is against Kathryn Garcia. It tends to suggest that he would receive between 48% and 56% support. In contrast, he polls well against both Andrew Yang and Maya Wiley. No polls that have publicly released data about these pairwise matchups suggest he would do worse than 56% against Yang or 54% against Wiley.

However, Garcia is no lock to make the final round. If Yang finishes 4th, Garcia and Wiley would be nearly tied for elimination. There is limited information on what will happen if Wiley finishes 4th, but what information exists suggests that Garcia would be eliminated in a final 3 against Adams and Yang.

Here is an example of a poll that showed a nonmonotonic result:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qvizm3xxx1jjvyv/dfp_tech_team_memo_nyc_rcv_2021_06_21.pdf

That said, I suspect that polls of the race may be overestimating voters' tendency to rank additional candidates just by explicitly asking about it. This reduces the chance of a paradox.

Unfortunately, New York City does not appear to release the actual ballot data, so if a paradox does occur, we might not be able to catch it. Related: https://www.thecity.nyc/2021/5/12/22433507/ranked-choice-voting-software-new-york-city

That said, they will release two preliminary reports that run through the IRV counting process before they have all of the ballots. This could be an effective demonstration of how chaotic the process can get if the absentee ballots change the ranking.

@keith-edmonds I don't think there are monotonicity implications for having more than 2 candidates in the runoff. Obviously lowering a candidate's score will not help them place in the top cut after the first round, because Score itself is monotonic. In the runoff, lowering a candidate's raw score will either decrease their runoff score and not change the scores of the other ballots (if it was above the minimum score before being lowered) or increase the runoff scores of other candidates by pushing down the minimum for that ballot.

To me, this seems like a dilution of STAR. If the lower end of the top cut is weak (e.g. we have an election with 12 candidates, 3 of whom are serious, and 9 of whom are not), then very few ballots actually get normalized.

A final consideration is that if, for example, there are 3 slots in the runoff, and the two most popular candidates are something like a "center-left vs center-right split", then it would be an advantage for the center-right candidate for the third slot to go to a left-wing candidate as the votes that gave a full score to that candidate will not normalize (unlike in STAR), and the same goes the other way around. Again I interpret this as a dilution of STAR. I also see it as a possible strategic voting issue because if candidates in the lower end of the top cut are not strong enough to be threats to win, then the threat of a strategy of raising favorable match ups backfiring is less of a deterrent, unlike in STAR.

Update following the first preliminary results.

Last night, the NYC Board of Elections released a preliminary IRV count. These results included several test ballots that should have been cleared from the system before counting the actual votes. This suggests incompetence on the part of the NYC Board of Elections, but it would be unfair to blame this on IRV. The revised results have just been released. All in all, they suggest that the polling before the race was generally accurate.

The first preliminary count, which does not include absentee ballots, indicates that the final 3 candidates were Adams, Garcia, and Wiley. The chance that the absentee ballots change this is virtually zero.

Garcia and Wiley are virtually tied for elimination in the round of 3. The current preliminary count has Garcia ahead of Wiley by 347 votes in this round (about 0.045% of the non-exhausted vote). In the final round, Adams leads Garcia by 14,755 votes (about 2.1% of the non-exhausted vote). (If you read my original post about this election, you might note that these results are not surprising.)

With a bit more than 100,000 absentee ballots not considered in the computation, either outcome could conceivably change by the time all of the absentee votes are counted. Consequently, both the Garcia and Wiley campaign supporters believe that they could come back and win. But the Wiley supporters should be careful what they wish for. Wiley's head to head numbers against Adams were much worse than Garcia's in the pre-election polling. Unfortunately, because the NYC Board of Elections' implementation of IRV has been one of the least transparent in the US, we have no official data on the Wiley vs Adams pairwise matchup. If we did, I think it would clearly demonstrate that IRV still has a spoiler problem,since Wiley is far more likely to spoil a win for Garcia than become mayor herself.

@rob said in Score Sorted Margins:

It sounds like an "iterate until it settles on an equilibrium" sort of thing. At first blush, I'm not 100% convinced it will always find an equilibrium. Has it been proven to?

Yes, it can be proven to always find an equilibrium.

Note that only adjacent candidates can be swapped in the ranking, and that when adjacent candidates are swapped, the only relation that changes is the one between those two candidates.

Thus if we start at a ranking in which A>B, and move to a ranking in which B>A, then at some step some point, A and B must have been adjacent, and then they must have swapped positions, implying that B beats A pairwise. So to move back to a ranking in which A>B, A would have to beat B pairwise. But A and B cannot both beat each other pairwise.

Therefore we cannot move from a newer ranking to an older one.

I'll grant that this system is probably too complex to be implemented in practice, but it's my favorite theoretically.

@keith-edmonds Yes, I anticipate that I should be back for the committee. I was going to post something in the loomio thread but I think that a lot of the goals that I was thinking of had already been said (and I don't think I need to try to come up with a whole lot of others since the goals other people stated seem like plenty to do already.)

@sarawolk I have indicated my availability.

The CES forum appears to no longer be online. It appears to have been taken down fairly recently; probably this month even as I know I have checked in the past occasionally and found that it was still up, just inactive.

I would recommend that links to the old forum be updated to refer to the archive.

In order for such a system to effectively deter strategic voting, the best strategies in the component systems used need to be sufficiently different. Otherwise common vulnerabilities still can be exploited. The most useful strategy in Score and Condorcet is usually exaggeration, so I am skeptical that the two systems effectively complement each other.

There is also a risk that mixing many systems in this way could compound their strategic vulnerabilities rather than offset them.

Strategic voting in Condorcet methods often attempts to increase the size of the Smith set and force cycles. The same strategies could be used with this system since the size of the Smith set also indicates how many winners the Score-based methods are expected to return. Random selection can be exploited by running many similar candidates, since when the Smith set contains multiple candidates, cloning a candidate in the Smith set would cause the clone to be added to the Smith set.

@bettervoting Well, taking the 2-seat example super literally would imply that there's not much point in having the second seat.

@keith-edmonds OK, I made a page for it here. https://electowiki.org/wiki/Voting_Theory_Forum