@cfrank Yes, but "choose-any" was selected on the basis of being clear (it rolls off the tongue less well than "approval" I'd say), so it really needs to do that job perfectly before we get on to how well it rolls off the tongue.
Edit - I'd say "choose any number" is a little bit less clunky than "choose however many", but neither are great in that respect.
@wolftune There is this thread from 2024. I think it might have passed me by at the time. I see your point about it being clearer about what it does, but on the other hand, it's not something I've really thought about, so I don't think I will suddenly change my language immediately based on this. It's quite a big thing to do, and I think I would need to see that there is a larger consensus in the general voting community that this is the best name, rather than just individuals deciding one at a time.
Edit - Thinking about it, "Choose-any" comes across as ambiguous to me. It could come across as "choose any one".
I think it's fine to have it here, but being a US-specific thing, I probably don't have much to say on it!
@sarawolk said in RCV found unconstitutional in Maine.:
@toby-pereira
In RCV a vote is the voters top choice in the first round and each round following. The first round finds the Plurality winner and if that candidate has a majority of active votes the election is called right then and there, but if that winner has a plurality of votes but not a majority of active votes, the system may reject that and go on to find a separate winner by reallocating or exhausting those votes. That's why it's not a Plurality method.In STAR Voting the first round never determines a winner because votes haven't been awarded to candidates yet. That always happens only once in STAR Voting and the candidate with the most votes always wins.
Right, so you're saying that because the IRV counting process could end after any round, it is necessary to call each round a vote.
However, IRV does not need to use the counting process where it stops in the round when a candidate first has a majority. It could just continue until there are two candidates left and just call that final round "the vote". It would never affect the (first place) result, but would just require a bit of extra counting.
But regardless, as I say, I'm not sure a voting method's own definition of what a vote is would hold any weight against what a court says a vote is.
And even if we allow that, by calling just the final run-off in STAR the vote, the method is also excluding most of the candidates from the voting process, which I think might be considered unconstitutional.
Obviously it's not me you would be arguing against, but these are just things that I can imagine might come up.
@sarawolk said in RCV found unconstitutional in Maine.:
The Supreme Court of Maine has once again ruled on the constitutionality of Ranked Choice Voting, again finding it to be unconstitutional.
In 2017 they had ruled that RCV was not compatible with Maine's requirement for a Plurality winner (the candidate with the most votes wins). In RCV, ballots are initially counted as votes for first-choice candidates, but those same votes can later be transferred or discarded, meaning the final winner may not be the candidate who received the most votes as originally cast.
...
It's worth noting that STAR Voting and Approval Voting both comply with the Maine Constitution's plurality winner rule. STAR Voting only finds the Plurality winner once, in the Automatic Runoff round. It clearly defines the vote as the runoff vote and defines scores as ballot data - not votes. Votes are never reassigned, transferred, or exhausted. Your vote goes to the finalist you prefer or counts as equal support for both, essentially like an abstain between those two. The candidate with the most votes wins.
This seems slightly tenuous. I don't think we can go by how STAR defines itself by saying that only the runoff is "the vote". Otherwise IRV / RCV could just redefine itself to declare that only the final runoff is "the vote".
The point is that it's surely about how this supreme court defines a vote, not how an individual voting method does.
Just bumping this thread because of a discussion on the EM mailing list about participation.
While it is claimed that this method passes participation, the discussions very much led to the conclusion that it does not, unless defined in a very weak way.
There are situations where someone's expected utility can be reduced by voting.
It might be that given we don't know from the ballot what the utilities are, there is a possible way to come up with utilities so that participation would not be violated. But that's just the same as saying that we can't prove from the ballot information alone that participation has not been violated. Very weak.
The discussion is from here onwards.
In terms of consolidation we have the electowiki, which is a good place to put stuff.
But you can search the forum quite easily. Click on the magnifying glass at the top and you can search for terms. I can normally find what I'm looking for fairly quickly. I would say this is better than for other discussion groups like Reddit or Facebook.
Just to clarify what's happening here:
A maximal lottery result can be something like:
A: 50%
B: 30%
C : 20%
where these are the probabilities of the candidates A, B and C being elected. So is non-uniqueness simply that sometimes there might be another probability distribution that is also optimal? E.g.
A: 55%
B: 35%
C : 10%
(Or maybe some sort of continuum of optimal results.)
You said that where preferences are strict and the number of voters is odd, there will be a unique solution. Is this simply because an even number of voters can lead to a head-to-head tie between two candidates, or is there something else more complex going on with an even number of voters? It seems intuitive to me that it's just because ties can happen.
In the case of ties, this isn't a problem unique to Maximal Lotteries. You can get ties in any voting method, e.g. FPTP and have to deal with that somehow. With a big election, ties will be rare. Obviously it's less likely with FPTP because it requires a tie at the top, whereas with Maximal Lotteries, there can be a tie between any pair of candidates potentially affecting the result.
It can be argued that in the case of more than one optimal lottery, it doesn't matter which one you choose because they are all optimal for the voters. Some will work out better for some candidates (a higher probability of election), but elections are about what voters want. They're not really about the candidates.
In the same way that a lottery generates the winning candidate, you can simply have a random mechanism to determine which lottery to use. I don't see this as a major problem in the general scheme of things.
@cfrank I've had a short look at it. The main conclusion seems to be that you can approximate maximal lotteries with balls in urns!
@cfrank I'll try and have a look in the next few days.
@cfrank I think lottery methods in general are interesting and worth looking into. Looking at the Wikipedia page, it seems interesting that this would satisfy participation but not monotonicity, which is the opposite of most Condorcet methods. So while some might criticise it for failing monotonicity (seen as easy to get in a Condorcet method), the prize is arguably better, since elections are really about voters rather than candidates.
@kaptain5 said in Professional Politicians skew towards altrusism? [study to read]:
In this study an interesting finding was that on average politicians we behaving altruistically (giving more to the other party than they would receive). On average over all sampled politicians were giving 49% of the prize to political opponents and giving 57% to in-group members. Compared to most other studies of the ultimatum game this is far above most people and very far above the rational expectation. The result is also remarkably consistent between countries. When the out-group and in-group results are combined this gives the result that the politicians surveyed are slightly altruistic in the game.
This one surprised me, I expected the politicians surveyed to be much more greedy.
I haven't properly read the paper but this bit is interesting, and I've been considering whether we should be surprised or not. Politicians certainly have a reputation for being greedy and corruptible. But a lot of people who go into politics probably do so for the right reasons - that they actually want to make things better for people and remove unfairness etc.
I think there is more corruption at the top, but this isn't most politicians. Plus I also think that higher-up politicians might still have some good principles, but these conflict with other things that get in the way of that - wanting to get in with the right people, make the right deals etc. So removed from politics, they still might make fair decisions. They just happen to be morally weak in certain ways.
This looks interesting. I'm not sure I've necessarily got that much to add though but I'll see what comes out...
You're looking at utility, but this is with real people rather than a simulation, so I wonder how this will work.
Are they voting for more abstract things in which case will you ask the participants for their honest utility rating of the options in addition to their actual votes? Or are they voting for options that directly benefit them in a clearer way - e.g. option 1 means voters A, B and C get this amount of money/chocolate etc.
It will be interesting to see equilibria emerging from repeated elections, and which methods are more stable in that respect. There is obviously the question of how relevant this would be in the real world. National elections generally take place several years apart and a lot can change in between, and so voters wouldn't be able to apply game theory in the same way as they would with multiple elections close together under the same conditions. And also I imagine people in the study are more likely to be "clued up" than the average member of the public.
So that raises a question - with multiple elections, will it just be the same conditions each time just to see how the methods behave in these ideal conditions, or will certain variables change to make it more "realistic", or possibly you'd model both? Both would be interesting in their own ways.
This looks quite nice. Presumably for PR elections? I came up with something similarish when doing a mixed member system that used score/approval ballots, and you could vote for candidates and their parties together / separately.
I've seen weighted seats proposed before. It is a fairly intuitive idea, so nothing new. But my instinct is that I don't think it's such a good idea. I think there is something to be said for a parliament made up of people with equal power.
Would the weighting purely count towards their voting power in the elected body, or does it have other effects such as more time to speak?
I think one problem is that it there might be a "celebrity" effect. If multiple candidates are standing for one party, the best well known one is likely to take most of the power available to that party without necessarily being "better".
Also while it's based on votes, voters don't get a say in this weighting. I might prefer candidate A to B (from the same party, or having similar ideals) by a small amount but might still prefer them to have equal power in parliament rather than having all the power directed to A. So I'd have to weigh up what I think other people will vote for and then vote in the opposite direction to balance it out.
If democracy was working properly in the first place, there should be enough candidates out there to represent your views without having pin everything on potentially just one candidate - a single point of failure.
@cfrank said in Idea for truly proportional representation:
@Toby-Pereira I wonder what you think about this, since you have deeper knowledge of PR systems.
Just to let you know I've seen this, but I'll get back to you in the next few days. For some reason I'm not getting much time to post on here at the moment!
There is an online obituary if you want to read it here.
@cfrank While I'm not an expert in how to make methods pass particular criteria, participation seems to be a very hard one to get. Most of the methods that pass it seem to be simple adding up ones (e.g. FPTP, Borda, approval, score), although Descending Solid Coalitions and Descending Acquiescing Coalitions are slightly weird methods that do pass it apparently.
@cfrank said in Fixing Participation Failure in “Approval vs B2R”:
(6) Run a secondary, independent head-to-head election between the B2R winner and their adversary, with the following caveats:
--> Voters are not tied down in any way to their original preference between the B2R winner and the adversary, and can freely vote for either in the independent head-to-head. Also, voters who did not participate in the first round are fully allowed to participate in the final round. By default, voters' original ballots will be used to determine the preference, but voters may opt in to swap their rating either 0 or 1 times, whichever amount is necessary to indicate an advantage that they wish to disclose.
--> However, based on these swaps, we can count the net number of swaps that are advantageous to the adversary over the B2R winner compared with the original ballots. If this number is positive, the election proceeds as you would expect, with ties broken by the sort order. However, if the number is not positive, if the original head-to-head was in favor of the B2R survivor, and if a material difference would be incurred, then the adversary will be conferred an automatic +1 head-to-head advantage, and will also automatically win ties.
I find this part a bit hard to understand.
Also, if it's an independent head-to-head, do you mean a separate trip to the polling station, or just a separate part of the ballot paper? If it's a separate trip, then it would be impossible to manage the swaps and each voter's default position without losing anonymity.