Best posts made by Sass

@rob,

As stated in your original post, "It’s not like there is much activity." So why, then, do you keep highlighting that "[Equal Vote hasn't] even visited the forum in ages." What do you count as Equal Vote?

Until 8 months ago, @SaraWolk was the only employee, and now I'm the second. But are we the only people who count as "Equal Vote"? I'd say no. @Andy-Dienes was recently the chair of our PR Research Committee. @Keith-Edmonds is a board member. @Marcus-Ogren is leading Equal Vote research. @Jameson-Quinn is doing the same. @masiarek helps with outreach and the Software Development Committee. I could go on, but I consider all of these fine folks to be a part of Equal Vote and when they post here, that counts as Equal Vote participation.

We promote the Forum in our slack regularly. It's linked on the Equal Vote site. And have you checked out similar forums recently? There hasn't been much text-based activity anywhere lately. r/EndFPTP is mostly news articles about RCV. The three voting theory channels in the CES discord are so dead that when I promote my Open Democracy Discussions in them every week, the most recent post is often my promotion from the previous week. The Forward Party discord server had some activity when it started up, but it's died down, too. The most in-depth text-based discussions about voting theory recently have been nonsense Twitter fights with people who think improving single winner elections in the US is completely pointless. There's just a general apathy in the theory space right now. I suspect it's temporary and will ramp back up when high-profile US election campaigns pick up steam, but for now, the issue isn't a lack of participation from Equal Vote.

Obviously, we all want the forum to be better. So why not offer that? There's no need to wrap it up in some weird package about you "running" it. As Sara stated, there are processes for all of this, agreed on by a council of active volunteers.

Though I wasn't around for the founding, I'm privy to the history. I'm included in the email threads. I wouldn't have moved 2,300 miles across the country if I didn't care enough to learn it all. Moreover, I care enough that I've cultivated a space where the in-depth voting theory discussions ARE happening: my Open Democracy Discussions. They're not text-based, but they've attracted some of the folks here like @stardrop, @last19digitsofpi, @Jack-Waugh, @robla, and even yourself once or twice. I think part of why people go there is because it's a space that is explicitly non-toxic. Sara has been talking about this for years and she's right. It's why she's been elected as the Executive Director of Equal Vote multiple times. Cooler heads have prevailed and realized that Sara is what this movement needs, and activists have responded positively to that.

I'll point out that I don't think Sara should be the dictator of the Forum or whatever. I work next to her every day. I promise you that she doesn't want to be. Sara's trying to cultivate a positive culture and I implore you take that to heart.

Fueling rage against Equal Vote only makes this forum worse. If you want to make this forum better, then start by making it better.

@jack-waugh The biggest organization that advocates for Ranked Choice (Instant Runoff) Voting says that it doesn’t help to elect third-party candidates.

https://www.fairvote.org/third_party_and_independent_representation

Ranked Choice (Instant Runoff) Voting only eliminates spoilers in favor of electing the correct duopoly candidate. When a voting method has high voting splitting, being a spoiler is about all of the power minor parties have over major parties to keep them accountable. It’s not much, but it’s something. Ranked Choice (Instant Runoff) Voting takes away what little power minor parties currently have over major parties, leaving the duopoly entirely unchecked rather than mostly unchecked.

To demonstrate, think about it from the perspective of a Republican candidate in a close race against a Democrat under Choose-one Voting. Some savvy Libertarian starts drawing away your voters. In order to ensure you can beat the Democrat, you have to concede something to the Libertarians instead of sticking with your party line. Under Ranked Choice (Instant Runoff) Voting, you don’t have to worry about that because the Libertarian votes will just transfer to you after the Libertarian candidate is eliminated. The same dynamic happens between the Democrats and the Green Party. In fact, half of what the Green Party talks about is how to get the Democrats to shift, not how to win elections.

When vote splitting remains in a duopoly, the spoiler effect is arguably a necessary evil. The solution is not to mitigate the spoiler effect — the solution is to eliminate vote splitting, which Ranked Choice (Instant Runoff) Voting doesn’t do because it’s really just iterated Choose-one Voting. Ultimately, the problems of Choose-one Voting can’t be solved by iterating it over and over again.

I could keep going, but whatever their goals are, demonstrate clearly that Ranked Choice (Instant Runoff) Voting doesn’t address them.

@bternarytau Thank you for bringing attention to this. I work with @SaraWolk everyday and I'm certain it was not the intention to dis you. I'll bring this to her attention and I'm confident she'll reach out and work with you to find a solution.

@rob I'm down to keep working on ballot language. I think we need to come up with several different versions and do real field testing because every voting enthusiast seems to have a different idea about how to shift it. The shortest explanation of the tally is actually a single sentence with two clauses:

Among the candidates who tie for winning the most head-to-head matchups, elect the candidate with the best average rank.

There's some ambiguity in there in my opinion because the word "among" is being leaned on heavily, and I don't like using the mathematically equivalent "best average rank" explanation because I think it's misleading to voters despite the line saying that skipped ranks are ignored. The point is there's definitely a range of how descriptive we can be with it.

@jack-waugh Almost. Yes, under IRV, your first choice is always counted in the first round, but who cares about the first round? The final tally is the most important one that will get reported, and the final tally is the round that throws out the most ballots. As an example, in the 2021 New York City Democratic Mayoral Primary, Eric Adams was reported to have received 50.5% of the vote to Kathryn Garcia's 49.5%, but that's only because that tally ignored over 140,000 ballots. In reality, Adams only received 43% and Garcia 42%. That matters. Electability is rooted in perception. The voters of NYC were tricked into believing that Eric Adams had majority support when actually there's a clear majority that didn't vote for him. Under Choose-one Voting, that would have been much clearer. Under Choose-one Voting, I know that my vote will always send a message, even if it doesn't affect the outcome of the election.

Full disclosure, I tweeted that from the STAR Voting twitter account in reply to a direct question about the different methods. Twitter has a tight character limit and I find value in keeping the core of a response to one tweet, so I had to be brief.

Keith said something very similar to that quote in an interview I did with him:
Youtube Video – [00:56..]

Otherwise, I think Keith spelled out the core reasonings behind Equal Vote's stance.

@jack-waugh It fails Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives. Unlike Ranked STAR, Ranked Robin (the official name of this method) is not a score method disguised as a ranked method -- that's what Ranked STAR is for. Ranked Robin fills a different need.

@andy-dienes I agree that it's mostly speculation at this point, though I have seen other papers and reports suggesting it's not that I need to find again.

I think the point about voters feeling like they have a fair choice needs to be qualified: it's important that we use systems that won't cause that feeling to backfire down the road. If voters like it at first, great. But if we're lying to them to make it that way, then when they inevitably discover the truth, we may end up in a worse place than where we started. It's important that we set ourselves and society up for success the first time, otherwise morale for voting method reform could be destroyed for a generation or more.

It's so devastating. I just want to fly out to Fargo and hug everyone there.

@jack-waugh It's really weird reading a Score advocate claim that voting behavior should be based on hatred and fear. Score is all about consensus.

Also, "Tongue Kiss" is super f****** gross. I'm genuinely repulsed and knowing that it's from the person who manages this site makes me want leave the entire forum.

Anyway, 3-2-1 was really designed with with the delegation case in mind, not the undelegated case. Quinn is expecting many voters to rate a single candidate "Good" and then let most of their ballot be filled out by that favorite. You seem to argue in favor of favorites anyway, so I'm not sure what you issue with it is.

Voters tend to use the scores 100, 99, 50, 1, and 0. That corresponds to favorite, backup, meh, lesser evil, greater evil. Your scale is super lopsided. Really, you should just use those 5 terms and then find the two semi-finalists with the fewest "evil" ratings, regardless of whether they're lesser or greater.

If there are exactly two candidates tied after your convoluted calculations, just elect the one who beats the other head to head.

This seems stupendously obvious to an almost condescending degree, but I feel like this concept is often ignored when getting into the weeds with crazy Condorcet methods.

"If the they tie for the least greatest margin of loss, then elect the tied candidate with the least greatest number of winning votes from their pairwise oppositions." - a Minmax variation

It feels excessive at a certain point. Sometimes, the math for some methods creates more ties rather than fewer (see Schulze). I can't imagine being a voter knowing that a tie between my favorite and another candidate my favorite beat was broken in favor of the other candidate because of some crazy math algorithm I don't understand. I know most of these methods are more theoretical than practical, but to me, any tie-breaking method that doesn't naturally comply with this concept every time is fundamentally broken.

@andy-dienes Do you believe those gains are sustainable?

"In the 2014 survey, the gaps between resident perceptions of three indicators of campaign negativity in RCV and non-RCV cities were narrower than they were in the 2013 version..."

I believe that when voters and candidates are honest and excited, such as the first few cycles after IRV is implemented and FairVote convinces everyone they can finally be positive and honest, then IRV does perform better than Choose-one Voting and exhibits some of the positive effects that are often sold. However, as time goes on and the voters and candidates experience that their shiny new method keeps electing the same politicians as their old one, things will revert. That seems to show up in analyses of voter turnout in IRV jurisdictions after enough time.

https://www.rangevoting.org/IRVturnoutSF.html

@multi_system_fan https://electowiki.org/wiki/Smith//Score
Good luck explaining the Smith Set to lay voters.

@rob We talked in my open democracy discussion last Tuesday, but just so it's down in text, I'll reiterate a few points I made for anyone reading.

In elections with only two competitive factions, any voting method would elect the Condorcet winner basically every time. Even with the hundreds of Ranked Choice (Instant Runoff) Voting elections in modern US history, only a tiny number of them have had 3+ competitive factions, and most of those did not elect the Condorcet winner.

Electing the Condorcet winner is irrelevant when the elections aren't competitive. Ranked Choice (Instant Runoff) Voting clearly doesn't promote competitive elections if for no other reason than its hyperfocus on (false) majority. If a candidate only needs to get half of the electorate to support them in order to win, then they have every incentive to polarize every issue, locking down half of the electorate while ignoring the other half. What makes Score elections competitive is that there is no minimum threshold candidates need to get over to guarantee a win -- they actually have to beat every other candidate, even if another candidate has support from 70% of the electorate; it's a race to the top, not a race to 50%+1.

Hey, so making Condorcet palatable for the public has been the dream of Condorcet enthusiasts for, like, ever, right? Well I tried something. The goal was to create a Condorcet method that was accurate enough while being able to present the results simply to the public in the media.

Introducing "Ranked Advantage Voting"

Here's the first prototype for ballot language:

What the public is shown when there's a Condorcet winner:

Here's an example of a 3-cycle:

And a 5-cycle:

I haven't done any serious analysis on it yet, but that's why I'm posting it -- I want help. The goal is to appeal to Ranked Choice (Instant Runoff) Voting activists, particularly Andrew Yang, hence the name of the method. John Huang is running it through VSE this week for me. Otherwise, I just want input. Whatever you've got. I haven't put too much time into this yet, but if there's a major weak point, then I need to go back to the drawing board.

@andy-dienes Yes, I'll add clarification to my statement.

I don't think IRV inherently elects more polarizing candidates than Choose-one Voting because of its mechanics. What I've seen is that in the US right now, because of the way IRV is sold, after it's implemented somewhere, candidate (exit) strategy and voter strategy decreases (at least initially). That would cause either method to elect more polarizing candidates, and I'm pointing in particular to (rare) IRV elections like Burlington, VT 2009 and this ongoing Alaska Special General Election with 3 distinct front-runners. As voters and candidates better figure out IRV, I would expect it to "reduce" mostly back to Choose-one Voting with similar candidate and voter strategy. The transparency and familiarity of Choose-one Voting helps it to "stabilize".

New cool thing I'll add from another forum:

Whoever's presenting the results gets to decide how deep into the info they want to show.

Level 1: The overall winner.
Level 2: The finalists' total advantages.
Level 3: The number of matchups each candidate won, determining the finalists.
Level 4: The finalists' relative advantages over each other.
Level 5: The preference matrix.

Note that "relative advantage" is between a single pair of candidates and can be negative. "Total advantage" is the sum of all of a given candidate's relative advantages.

I just manually checked mine (the first one) and it's correct. I suspect the second one counts equal preferences as half points for each candidate in the pairwise comparison. I haven't seen that before, but there is a metric that a voting method could use that would be screwed up by doing it: total number of pairwise preferences over all candidates. That would be sum of the entire row of a candidate. Candidates who are ranked equally to other candidates on more ballots would benefit. However, that's an unreliable metric generally and is really only useful for tiebreaking. So basically my conclusion is that both approaches are correct and should give you the same results, at least for Ranked Robin (not including the 3rd degree tiebeaker).

A few things, all.

@masiarek, if I rank candidate A first, candidate B second, and candidate C third, then I know the order I prefer each, but not by how much compared to each other. If I had a 5-star ballot, I might give A 5 stars, B 4 stars, and C 0 stars; or I might give A 5 stars, B 1 star, and C 0 stars. There’s no way for you to determine how I really feel about B based only on my rankings. However, if I start with a 5-star ballot and give A 5 stars, B 3 stars, and C 0 stars, then you know for sure that I would rank A first, B second, and C third. You can always extract a full set of rankings from a set of scores, but usually you cannot extract a full set of scores from a set of rankings. Scores contain strictly more information than ranks; therefore, a score ballot allows voters to express more information than a rank ballot, i.e. score ballots are more expressive.

In my opinion, a rank ballot that allows equal ranks allows for a sufficient degree of expression to consistently determine the candidate closest to the center of public opinion, and the simulations support my claim as good Condorcet methods perform on par with good score methods.

@Toby-Pereira, you are overestimating the frequency of Condorcet cycles in real-world elections. As more people have studied the question, the estimates have gone down and down.

Additionally, Ranked Robin fails clone independence in the opposite direction of Choose One Voting. This means that to gain an advantage, a party would have to support entire campaigns of multiple candidates who are seen as identical by the electorate. This is so difficult in practice that it legitimately can be dismissed as a real concern. Candidates like to differentiate themselves from each other, electorates do not behave predictably, and campaigns are egregiously expensive. These difficulties are further amplified under a method like Ranked Robin that incentivizes candidates to appeal evenly to the entire electorate (see @Marcus-Ogren’s new paper on Candidate Incentive Distribution).

Also, if there’s not a Condorcet winner, then there are multiple scenarios more likely than a top-3 cycle that Ranked Robin resolves simply. Check out the electowiki.

https://electowiki.org/wiki/Ranked_Robin

Furthermore, your claim that Ranked Pairs is simple is…absurd. I canvass for STAR Voting, a far simpler method, every day, and it truly is at the limit of what we can expect lay voters in America to digest.

Simplicity actually is the most important factor for a Condorcet method because…it’s a Condorcet method. By that metric alone, it excels at both accuracy and honesty, and is also sufficiently expressive.