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dlw: In the FPTP case, it trims the ability of dissenters to move the de facto center towards the true center.  In the IRV case, it does the opposite, it penalizes the major parties when they do not move enough towards the true center.

RBJ: again, that was not the case in Burlington.  the center party was "squeezed" (as Jameson would say).  the candidate in the center received nearly all of the 2nd-choice votes from voters who ranked one of either the left or right wing candidates 1st.  it was relatively rare that the left-wing voter ranked the right-wing candidate as their 2nd choice and also vise versa.  but the center candidate did not benefit from that because IRV is opaque to your 2nd choice if your 1st choice has not been eliminated.  but, under Condorcet-compliant rules, the center candidate would have benefited greatly (and would be elected), so it can be said that Condorcet tends to favor the center candidate more (than either IRV or FPTP) whereas IRV tends to favor the largest subgroup (i.e. the Progs, in Burlington in 2009) of the majority group (liberals).  and, we know, that FPTP gives the minority candidate the best chance they have of winning (they need a 3rd-party or 3rd independent candidate to draw votes away from what would be their majority opponent if the spoiler was not there).

dlw: Most rational choice models implicit here take as fixed the position of candidates/parties on the spectrum, when in real life, this can be changed somewhat.  This reduces the "badness" of strategic voting.  It becomes less important thereby to devise an election rule that doesn't give any incentive to anyone to vote strategically.

the reason why i have never agreed with that is because people *resent* being saddled with the burden of voting tactically and particularly resent finding out ex-post facto that their sincere vote served their political interests more poorly than the tactical vote (the most common tactic is "compromising").  that resentment has consequences, one of which is a cloud hanging over the elected candidate as not being entirely "legitimate", not being the "true" choice of the electorate.  but the worse consequence is that of holding back what would otherwise be viable independent or 3rd party candidates, sometimes leaving the voters with a choice between Dumb and Dumber.  that is the *main* evil we're trying to avoid with voting system and ballot reform.

we are *now* experiencing some of these consequences in Burlington.  the Progs have decided not to run a candidate (the current mayor is or was a Prog and is not running for re-election).  it looked for a while that there would be only two (Dem and GOP), but recently an independent candidate emerged and her political appeal is a lot like a Prog candidate (the Progs are not ashamed of sticking up for the poor and powerless whereas, ever since Reagan, Democrats have modified their rhetoric to be for "the middle class" so as not to sound "socialistic" or too "liberal", both were bad words and continue to be used disparagingly in American politics).  so we are going to have an interesting test case for the election coming up March 6.  we might very well get an elected candidate with 41% of the vote.

now the Progressive party in Vermont is declining *rapidly*.  Burlington is the most populous town in the state (but Vermont has the the least populous largest city of all 50 states) with a population of about 42000.  we have about 9000 voters in a mayoral election.  the Democratic caucus had over 1000 valid voters showing up.  the Prog caucus (which i attended as an observer, so also did another EM lister, who i just discovered has a Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Bouricius but he was a voting attendee) easily had less than 2 dozen voting members.  2 of the 14 Burlington city councilors are Prog.  *any* of the state legislators have been forced to identify themselves as dual affiliated, Dem/Prog, in order to get elected.

i truly fear the demise of what was once identified as the most successful third party in the United States.

i'll keep you guys informed.  we have an interesting real-world election laboratory here.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bryan Mills <bmills <at> alumni.cmu.edu>
To: David L Wetzell <wetzelld <at> gmail.com>
Cc: election-methods <at> electorama.com
Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2012 00:02:47 -0500
Subject: Re: [EM] STV+AV.

> Why STV? The original poster wanted elected representatives to have votes
> proportional to their electoral support yes? There's no need for fractional
> transfers from elected candidates then.
> >
>
> IRV is a form of STV, but it's not my favorite.  Some of the other STV
> methods (e.g. Schulze-STV and CPO-STV) tend to produce better eliminations.
>
> But the question of why not STV is a good one.  Several reasons.
>
> STV requires much more work on the part of the voter - ranking all the way
> down to a candidate likely to be elected, instead of just one.  That
> probably means a much larger ballot and/or an arbitrary cutoff between
> ballot-candidates and write-in candidates.
>
dlw: If the number of possible rankings is the number of seats + 2 then
it's not too bad.  And nobody would be forced to rank umpteen candidates,
so the low-info voters could just vote for their favorite candidate.

The number of possible rankings is quite a lot larger than S+2.  Even if you don't transfer votes from elected candidates, there are still C-S candidates eliminated -- so you'd have (C choose C-S-1)*(C-S-1)! distinguishable rankings, and even more if you allow equal rankings.  The only way out seems to be to pre-filter the set of candidates, so you basically have to drop to approval voting at some point -- candidate-registration petitions and the like -- and then we're back to an arbitrary cutoff.

Partial rankings might be workable in a weighted-seat STV variant, though.  If a vote only transfers in case of elimination (and not in case of surplus), one would only need to rank candidates down to the first candidate sufficiently likely to be elected, and you could split the ballot into manageable chunks by party.  Determining a suitable cutoff candidate still has a cognitive cost, but it probably wouldn't be that bad in practice.

But if we assume that partial rankings are effective, there's still the strategy/computation tradeoff to deal with: allowing truncated ballots still doesn't help with favorite-betrayal, and STV variants less susceptible to favorite-betrayal are also less susceptible to efficient counting.

> The STV variants that are less strategy-prone are computationally
> inefficient, and even those are not strategy-free.
>
> And perhaps most importantly, the more resistant an STV method is to
> strategy, the more complicated it is to explain and understand.
>
> As deterministic methods go, I do like STV methods; but DS fixes a lot of
> the worries I have about them.
>
dlw: One could also apply the same sort of approach to simplifying STV with the
initial treatment of all of the rankings as approval votes to get the
number of candidates down to N+2, where N is the number of seats.
As with IRV, it's easier to explain STV when there's relatively few
candidates to eliminate.  And, it'll mitigate the strategy effects, which
have to be examined more closely.

The initial treatment of rankings as approval votes introduces some other problems, though.

With an explicit "approval threshold" in the ranking, it induces a substantial cognitive cost on the voter (determining the approval threshold strategically).

With an implicit "first-preference" approval, it has the same problem as traditional STV (i.e. IRV), namely of unduly rewarding favorite-betrayal.

With an implicit "all-ranked" approval, the overall system would likely violate later-no-harm with much higher frequency; by expressing a preference between two dispreferred candidates one might unintentionally put the higher of the two in contention.

It may well be that these issues are all less severe than in the deterministic alternatives to STV, but I still think they're enough to merit consideration of nondeterministic alternatives.

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On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 11:03 PM, <election-methods-request <at> lists.electorama.com> wrote:

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dlw: In the FPTP case, it trims the ability of dissenters to move the de facto center towards the true center.  In the IRV case, it does the opposite, it penalizes the major parties when they do not move enough towards the true center.

RBJ: again, that was not the case in Burlington.  the center party was "squeezed" (as Jameson would say).  the candidate in the center received nearly all of the 2nd-choice votes from voters who ranked one of either the left or right wing candidates 1st.  it was relatively rare that the left-wing voter ranked the right-wing candidate as their 2nd choice and also vise versa.  but the center candidate did not benefit from that because IRV is opaque to your 2nd choice if your 1st choice has not been eliminated.  but, under Condorcet-compliant rules, the center candidate would have benefited greatly (and would be elected), so it can be said that Condorcet tends to favor the center candidate more (than either IRV or FPTP) whereas IRV tends to favor the largest subgroup (i.e. the Progs, in Burlington in 2009) of the majority group (liberals).  and, we know, that FPTP gives the minority candidate the best chance they have of winning (they need a 3rd-party or 3rd independent candidate to draw votes away from what would be their majority opponent if the spoiler was not there).

dlw: But it is the case when you consider the incentives to vote strategically.  If in FPTP, dissenters are under pressure not to spoil, in the IRV case, it's the supporters of the R party who are under pressure not to spoil.  

IRV favors the "major party" (herein defined as one of the top two for an area) that is closest to the true center.  It thereby goads the two major parties to move towards the center, where it is easier for minority groups to play them off of each other to get attention to their reasonable demands.  

dlw: Most rational choice models implicit here take as fixed the position of candidates/parties on the spectrum, when in real life, this can be changed somewhat.  This reduces the "badness" of strategic voting.  It becomes less important thereby to devise an election rule that doesn't give any incentive to anyone to vote strategically.

the reason why i have never agreed with that is because people *resent* being saddled with the burden of voting tactically and particularly resent finding out ex-post facto that their sincere vote served their political interests more poorly than the tactical vote (the most common tactic is "compromising").  that resentment has consequences, one of which is a cloud hanging over the elected candidate as not being entirely "legitimate", not being the "true" choice of the electorate.  but the worse consequence is that of holding back what would otherwise be viable independent or 3rd party candidates, sometimes leaving the voters with a choice between Dumb and Dumber.  that is the *main* evil we're trying to avoid with voting system and ballot reform.

dlw: I think the main evil is the way the de facto center can get so detached from the true center.  If a major party refuses to adapt, it's voters are not going to be happy.  But regardless of whether they vote strategically or not, the momentum will be for the de facto center to approach the true center.  At the end of the day, what matters is who gets elected(how close they are to the center) and the momentum caused by the election, not whether everyone votes sincerely and is happy with the outcome.   

Single-winner elections will always tend not to elect 3rd party candidates.  That's why we need a mix of single and multi-winner elections to sustain 3rd parties that give more exit threat to minorities and check the influence of $peech on both the major parties.  

But as shown by Burlington, with IRV there can be turnover wrt who are the major parties and that is a significant improvement.  

we are *now* experiencing some of these consequences in Burlington.  the Progs have decided not to run a candidate (the current mayor is or was a Prog and is not running for re-election).  it looked for a while that there would be only two (Dem and GOP), but recently an independent candidate emerged and her political appeal is a lot like a Prog candidate (the Progs are not ashamed of sticking up for the poor and powerless whereas, ever since Reagan, Democrats have modified their rhetoric to be for "the middle class" so as not to sound "socialistic" or too "liberal", both were bad words and continue to be used disparagingly in American politics).  so we are going to have an interesting test case for the election coming up March 6.  we might very well get an elected candidate with 41% of the vote.

now the Progressive party in Vermont is declining *rapidly*.  Burlington is the most populous town in the state (but Vermont has the the least populous largest city of all 50 states) with a population of about 42000.  we have about 9000 voters in a mayoral election.  the Democratic caucus had over 1000 valid voters showing up.  the Prog caucus (which i attended as an observer, so also did another EM lister, who i just discovered has a Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Bouricius but he was a voting attendee) easily had less than 2 dozen voting members.  2 of the 14 Burlington city councilors are Prog.  *any* of the state legislators have been forced to identify themselves as dual affiliated, Dem/Prog, in order to get elected.

i truly fear the demise of what was once identified as the most successful third party in the United States.

i'll keep you guys informed.  we have an interesting real-world election laboratory here.

This is why we need to forge a working consensus on electoral reform to rally around people who don't want a contested monopoly that pretends to be a duopoly to remain in our state and nat'l politics.

 It seems like common sense that we should take inspiration from our limitations and push for electoral reforms that do not challenge duopoly but that do make it a contested duopoly.  

dlw

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bryan Mills <bmills <at> alumni.cmu.edu>
To: David L Wetzell <wetzelld <at> gmail.com>
Cc: election-methods <at> electorama.com
Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2012 00:02:47 -0500
Subject: Re: [EM] STV+AV.

> Why STV? The original poster wanted elected representatives to have votes
> proportional to their electoral support yes? There's no need for fractional
> transfers from elected candidates then.
> >
>
> IRV is a form of STV, but it's not my favorite.  Some of the other STV
> methods (e.g. Schulze-STV and CPO-STV) tend to produce better eliminations.
>
> But the question of why not STV is a good one.  Several reasons.
>
> STV requires much more work on the part of the voter - ranking all the way
> down to a candidate likely to be elected, instead of just one.  That
> probably means a much larger ballot and/or an arbitrary cutoff between
> ballot-candidates and write-in candidates.
>
dlw: If the number of possible rankings is the number of seats + 2 then
it's not too bad.  And nobody would be forced to rank umpteen candidates,
so the low-info voters could just vote for their favorite candidate.

The number of possible rankings is quite a lot larger than S+2.  Even if you don't transfer votes from elected candidates, there are still C-S candidates eliminated -- so you'd have (C choose C-S-1)*(C-S-1)! distinguishable rankings, and even more if you allow equal rankings.  The only way out seems to be to pre-filter the set of candidates, so you basically have to drop to approval voting at some point -- candidate-registration petitions and the like -- and then we're back to an arbitrary cutoff.

dlw: You misunderstood me.  If voters are only permitted to rank S+2 candidates then it's not as bad for voters.  

.   

Partial rankings might be workable in a weighted-seat STV variant, though.  If a vote only transfers in case of elimination (and not in case of surplus), one would only need to rank candidates down to the first candidate sufficiently likely to be elected, and you could split the ballot into manageable chunks by party.  Determining a suitable cutoff candidate still has a cognitive cost, but it probably wouldn't be that bad in practice.

If there are 3-5 seats STV then the number of candidates won't proliferate too much and there'd be 5-7 places to vote.  This would keep things reasonable.   

But if we assume that partial rankings are effective, there's still the strategy/computation tradeoff to deal with: allowing truncated ballots still doesn't help with favorite-betrayal, and STV variants less susceptible to favorite-betrayal are also less susceptible to efficient counting.

dlw: Truncated ballots may not end favorite betrayal, but it'll help with it.   

> The STV variants that are less strategy-prone are computationally
> inefficient, and even those are not strategy-free.
>
> And perhaps most importantly, the more resistant an STV method is to
> strategy, the more complicated it is to explain and understand.
>
> As deterministic methods go, I do like STV methods; but DS fixes a lot of
> the worries I have about them.
>
dlw: One could also apply the same sort of approach to simplifying STV with the
initial treatment of all of the rankings as approval votes to get the
number of candidates down to N+2, where N is the number of seats.
As with IRV, it's easier to explain STV when there's relatively few
candidates to eliminate.  And, it'll mitigate the strategy effects, which
have to be examined more closely.

The initial treatment of rankings as approval votes introduces some other problems, though.

With an explicit "approval threshold" in the ranking, it induces a substantial cognitive cost on the voter (determining the approval threshold strategically).

dlw: Once again, if the no. of seats isn't that great then they'd not have to sweat it too much.  Do I rank 1, 2, 3 or 5 candidates?  Who can I live with?I'd say it's an empirical question whether such would be a reasonable demand on voters.  And I'd reckon they'd get the hang of it with some practice...

 

With an implicit "first-preference" approval, it has the same problem as traditional STV (i.e. IRV), namely of unduly rewarding favorite-betrayal.

With an implicit "all-ranked" approval, the overall system would likely violate later-no-harm with much higher frequency; by expressing a preference between two dispreferred candidates one might unintentionally put the higher of the two in contention.

dlw: I'd say empirically we'd see just how high of a frequency LNH would be violated.  Jameson Quinn had a hard time coming up with a pathological example for IRV3/AV3 and I imagine it'd be similar for the above.  The 1st stage would reduce the number of candidates to N+2 and it seems likely that the N+2nd and N+3rd candidates in terms of "all-ranked" approval are less likely to be among the N winners.    

It may well be that these issues are all less severe than in the deterministic alternatives to STV, but I still think they're enough to merit consideration of nondeterministic alternatives.

In terms of the US's political culture, nondeterministic alternatives are not going to happen anytime in the near future and we need electoral reform ASAP!!!!

dlw 

_______________________________________________
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----
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info

I just can't quit you...

2012/2/1 David L Wetzell <wetzelld <at> gmail.com>

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 11:03 PM, <election-methods-request <at> lists.electorama.com> wrote:

Send Election-Methods mailing list submissions to
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When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of Election-Methods digest..."

dlw: In the FPTP case, it trims the ability of dissenters to move the de facto center towards the true center.  In the IRV case, it does the opposite, it penalizes the major parties when they do not move enough towards the true center.

RBJ: again, that was not the case in Burlington.  the center party was "squeezed" (as Jameson would say).  the candidate in the center received nearly all of the 2nd-choice votes from voters who ranked one of either the left or right wing candidates 1st.  it was relatively rare that the left-wing voter ranked the right-wing candidate as their 2nd choice and also vise versa.  but the center candidate did not benefit from that because IRV is opaque to your 2nd choice if your 1st choice has not been eliminated.  but, under Condorcet-compliant rules, the center candidate would have benefited greatly (and would be elected), so it can be said that Condorcet tends to favor the center candidate more (than either IRV or FPTP) whereas IRV tends to favor the largest subgroup (i.e. the Progs, in Burlington in 2009) of the majority group (liberals).  and, we know, that FPTP gives the minority candidate the best chance they have of winning (they need a 3rd-party or 3rd independent candidate to draw votes away from what would be their majority opponent if the spoiler was not there).

dlw: But it is the case when you consider the incentives to vote strategically.  If in FPTP, dissenters are under pressure not to spoil, in the IRV case, it's the supporters of the R party who are under pressure not to spoil.  

Replace "IRV" with the plurality in the following two sentences. The argument remains just as valid. Since it demonstrably doesn't work for plurality, it won't work for IRV (and the same goes for IRV3).

 

IRV favors the "major party" (herein defined as one of the top two for an area) that is closest to the true center.  It thereby goads the two major parties to move towards the center, where it is easier for minority groups to play them off of each other to get attention to their reasonable demands.  

dlw: Most rational choice models implicit here take as fixed the position of candidates/parties on the spectrum, when in real life, this can be changed somewhat.  This reduces the "badness" of strategic voting.  It becomes less important thereby to devise an election rule that doesn't give any incentive to anyone to vote strategically.

the reason why i have never agreed with that is because people *resent* being saddled with the burden of voting tactically and particularly resent finding out ex-post facto that their sincere vote served their political interests more poorly than the tactical vote (the most common tactic is "compromising").  that resentment has consequences, one of which is a cloud hanging over the elected candidate as not being entirely "legitimate", not being the "true" choice of the electorate.  but the worse consequence is that of holding back what would otherwise be viable independent or 3rd party candidates, sometimes leaving the voters with a choice between Dumb and Dumber.  that is the *main* evil we're trying to avoid with voting system and ballot reform.

dlw: I think the main evil is the way the de facto center can get so detached from the true center.  If a major party refuses to adapt, it's voters are not going to be happy.  But regardless of whether they vote strategically or not, the momentum will be for the de facto center to approach the true center.  At the end of the day, what matters is who gets elected(how close they are to the center) and the momentum caused by the election, not whether everyone votes sincerely and is happy with the outcome.   

Single-winner elections will always tend not to elect 3rd party candidates.  That's why we need a mix of single and multi-winner elections to sustain 3rd parties that give more exit threat to minorities and check the influence of $peech on both the major parties.  

But as shown by Burlington, with IRV there can be turnover wrt who are the major parties and that is a significant improvement.  

????? Are you saying IRV prompted the Progs to collapse and the Dems to replace them? Because that would have happened without IRV. Or are you saying that it made the Progs relevant? Because that seems to have aborted, even though given that they won the last election it would make more sense for the Republicans to collapse.

we are *now* experiencing some of these consequences in Burlington.  the Progs have decided not to run a candidate (the current mayor is or was a Prog and is not running for re-election).  it looked for a while that there would be only two (Dem and GOP), but recently an independent candidate emerged and her political appeal is a lot like a Prog candidate (the Progs are not ashamed of sticking up for the poor and powerless whereas, ever since Reagan, Democrats have modified their rhetoric to be for "the middle class" so as not to sound "socialistic" or too "liberal", both were bad words and continue to be used disparagingly in American politics).  so we are going to have an interesting test case for the election coming up March 6.  we might very well get an elected candidate with 41% of the vote.

now the Progressive party in Vermont is declining *rapidly*.  Burlington is the most populous town in the state (but Vermont has the the least populous largest city of all 50 states) with a population of about 42000.  we have about 9000 voters in a mayoral election.  the Democratic caucus had over 1000 valid voters showing up.  the Prog caucus (which i attended as an observer, so also did another EM lister, who i just discovered has a Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Bouricius but he was a voting attendee) easily had less than 2 dozen voting members.  2 of the 14 Burlington city councilors are Prog.  *any* of the state legislators have been forced to identify themselves as dual affiliated, Dem/Prog, in order to get elected.

i truly fear the demise of what was once identified as the most successful third party in the United States.

i'll keep you guys informed.  we have an interesting real-world election laboratory here.

This is why we need to forge a working consensus on electoral reform to rally around people who don't want a contested monopoly that pretends to be a duopoly to remain in our state and nat'l politics.

US national politics is a contested monopoly? That's news to me, given that it's rare for one party to control any branch of government for too long and rarer for one party to control all of them.

 

 It seems like common sense that we should take inspiration from our limitations and push for electoral reforms that do not challenge duopoly but that do make it a contested duopoly.  

Duopoly is what we have, and it doesn't work.

Jameson 

dlw

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bryan Mills <bmills <at> alumni.cmu.edu>
To: David L Wetzell <wetzelld <at> gmail.com>
Cc: election-methods <at> electorama.com
Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2012 00:02:47 -0500
Subject: Re: [EM] STV+AV.

> Why STV? The original poster wanted elected representatives to have votes
> proportional to their electoral support yes? There's no need for fractional
> transfers from elected candidates then.
> >
>
> IRV is a form of STV, but it's not my favorite.  Some of the other STV
> methods (e.g. Schulze-STV and CPO-STV) tend to produce better eliminations.
>
> But the question of why not STV is a good one.  Several reasons.
>
> STV requires much more work on the part of the voter - ranking all the way
> down to a candidate likely to be elected, instead of just one.  That
> probably means a much larger ballot and/or an arbitrary cutoff between
> ballot-candidates and write-in candidates.
>
dlw: If the number of possible rankings is the number of seats + 2 then
it's not too bad.  And nobody would be forced to rank umpteen candidates,
so the low-info voters could just vote for their favorite candidate.

The number of possible rankings is quite a lot larger than S+2.  Even if you don't transfer votes from elected candidates, there are still C-S candidates eliminated -- so you'd have (C choose C-S-1)*(C-S-1)! distinguishable rankings, and even more if you allow equal rankings.  The only way out seems to be to pre-filter the set of candidates, so you basically have to drop to approval voting at some point -- candidate-registration petitions and the like -- and then we're back to an arbitrary cutoff.

dlw: You misunderstood me.  If voters are only permitted to rank S+2 candidates then it's not as bad for voters.  

.   

Partial rankings might be workable in a weighted-seat STV variant, though.  If a vote only transfers in case of elimination (and not in case of surplus), one would only need to rank candidates down to the first candidate sufficiently likely to be elected, and you could split the ballot into manageable chunks by party.  Determining a suitable cutoff candidate still has a cognitive cost, but it probably wouldn't be that bad in practice.

If there are 3-5 seats STV then the number of candidates won't proliferate too much and there'd be 5-7 places to vote.  This would keep things reasonable.   

But if we assume that partial rankings are effective, there's still the strategy/computation tradeoff to deal with: allowing truncated ballots still doesn't help with favorite-betrayal, and STV variants less susceptible to favorite-betrayal are also less susceptible to efficient counting.

dlw: Truncated ballots may not end favorite betrayal, but it'll help with it.   

> The STV variants that are less strategy-prone are computationally
> inefficient, and even those are not strategy-free.
>
> And perhaps most importantly, the more resistant an STV method is to
> strategy, the more complicated it is to explain and understand.
>
> As deterministic methods go, I do like STV methods; but DS fixes a lot of
> the worries I have about them.
>
dlw: One could also apply the same sort of approach to simplifying STV with the
initial treatment of all of the rankings as approval votes to get the
number of candidates down to N+2, where N is the number of seats.
As with IRV, it's easier to explain STV when there's relatively few
candidates to eliminate.  And, it'll mitigate the strategy effects, which
have to be examined more closely.

The initial treatment of rankings as approval votes introduces some other problems, though.

With an explicit "approval threshold" in the ranking, it induces a substantial cognitive cost on the voter (determining the approval threshold strategically).

dlw: Once again, if the no. of seats isn't that great then they'd not have to sweat it too much.  Do I rank 1, 2, 3 or 5 candidates?  Who can I live with?I'd say it's an empirical question whether such would be a reasonable demand on voters.  And I'd reckon they'd get the hang of it with some practice...

 

With an implicit "first-preference" approval, it has the same problem as traditional STV (i.e. IRV), namely of unduly rewarding favorite-betrayal.

With an implicit "all-ranked" approval, the overall system would likely violate later-no-harm with much higher frequency; by expressing a preference between two dispreferred candidates one might unintentionally put the higher of the two in contention.

dlw: I'd say empirically we'd see just how high of a frequency LNH would be violated.  Jameson Quinn had a hard time coming up with a pathological example for IRV3/AV3 and I imagine it'd be similar for the above.  The 1st stage would reduce the number of candidates to N+2 and it seems likely that the N+2nd and N+3rd candidates in terms of "all-ranked" approval are less likely to be among the N winners.    

It may well be that these issues are all less severe than in the deterministic alternatives to STV, but I still think they're enough to merit consideration of nondeterministic alternatives.

In terms of the US's political culture, nondeterministic alternatives are not going to happen anytime in the near future and we need electoral reform ASAP!!!!

dlw 

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Hi Jameson,

 

I expect that unpredictability (whatever there may be) of candidates' decisions can only hurt criteria compliance.

At least with criteria that are generally defined on votes, because with such criteria you usually have to assume

the worst about any other influences incorporated into the method.

 

So I wonder, can you suggest a deterministic version of SODA, where the "negotiations" of SODA are instead

calculated directly from the pre-announced preferences of the candidates? And if so, does it satisfy the same

criteria in your view?

 

I can say I would be skeptical of how a criterion is being applied, or how clearly it is being defined, if the

satisfaction of it *depends* on the fact that candidates have post-voting decisions to make.

 

Kevin

 

 

De : Jameson Quinn <jameson.quinn <at> gmail.com>
À : EM <election-methods <at> lists.electorama.com>
Envoyé le : Mardi 31 janvier 2012 20h50
Objet : [EM] SODA criteria

SODA passes:

Majority

MMC (as voted)

Condorcet (as voted, and in a strong Nash equilibrium as honest)

Condorcet loser (ditto)

Monotone

Participation (with the fix that delegation can be any fraction)

IIA (delegated version - that is, if a new candidate is added, the winner is either the same, or someone higher on the new candidate's delegation order.)

Cloneproof

Polytime (there is no guarantee that optimal delegated assignment strategy is polytime calculable, but it will be in any real case, and anyway, candidates can just choose some near-optimal strategy.)

Resolvable

Summable

Allows equal rankings

FBC

So, of the criteria in the wikipedia voting systems table, the only ones it out-and-out fails are:

Consistency (though it comes damn close)

Later-no-harm and later-no-help (though it does satisfy LNHarm for the one (two????) candidate(s?) with the most voted approvals, and for other candidates, adding later preferences is probably strategically forced; so I'd say it fulfills the spirit of both of these. Similarly, it satisfies LNHelp for the last-to-delegate candidate, and nearly so for other late-delegating candidates, and the point of LNHelp is to prevent a weak candidate from winning through clever bottom filling, so again it satisfies the spirit.)

Allows later preferences (though delegation substitutes for this affordance in some cases.)

If we could just get some wikipedia-notable mention of SODA, we could put it in the table, and I think it would graphically stand out as the most criteria-compliant method there.

I'm working on an academic article on SODA, which would not be focused on these criteria or even on SODA, but would quickly state the above. But if anyone can make an article happen in a wikipedia "reliable source", that would be great.

Jameson

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Actually, if "maximally strategic" means "favorably changes the margin of victory" (the minimum number of ballots that would haved to change to change the utility of the outcome), then it only requires voting the two distinct frontrunners on opposite sides of the winning median. If those frontrunners are ideological opponents, chances are high that an honest ballot accomplishes this. If the two frontrunners are ideological near-clones from an opposing ideology, it is likely that their utility is about the same, so that the next frontrunner whose utility is distinct is ideologically opposed, and we're back to the previous case. So probably the only time strategy is an issue is in the chicken dilemma case, where the frontrunners are near-clones from a favored ideology. And in this case, the unswerving strategy is not meta-strategic; an ideological group which tends to be unswervingly strategic against its allies will tend to lose to its opponents. So basically, in all common cases there is at least a reasonable presumption that honesty is justifiable.

I should also talk a bit about zero-knowledge strategy. Even if you don't know anything about the popularities of the particular candidates involved, you still have robust statistical and historical reasons to believe that the winning median will be something around the middle score or slightly above. So even if you are relentlessly strategic, you can be almost sure that you are using the correct zero-knowlege strategy without maximally exaggerating. For instance, on the 6-level ballot that Balinsky and Laraki suggest, you could just avoid the middle two ratings (and perhaps once we have better statistics on historical elections, that might shrink to 1 or even 0 ratings to avoid). This has important psychological effects; since you still have expressive room to make a distinction between your favorite and an acceptable compromise, there is less of an impulse to unstrategically bullet vote than there would be under approval.

Well said.

I agree.