KM
Kristofer Munsterhjelm
Tue, Dec 28, 2021 9:55 AM
On 28.12.2021 06:56, Forest Simmons wrote:
Robert,
You wrote ...
"I'm just a Condorcet guy. How cycles get resolved is less motivating
to me than insuring that the Condorcet winner is always elected"
But "how cycles get resolved" has a big influence on whether or not they
come into existence. And when these cycles are created, the sincere
Condorcet Winner goes out the window ... no longer showing up as a
"beats-all" candidate on the ballot set. Can the cycle resolution method
reconstruct the lost CW? All bets are off.
The easier it is to game the cycle resolution method, the more incentive
for the gamers to create the cycles.
It seems that most Condorcet cycles are artificially created.
For example, one way to create a cycle is by an insincere rank reversal
technique called "burial".
If the cycle resolution method has no built in disincentive/negative
feedback for this (or any other) kind of cycle creation, over time the
gamers find out that they can manipulate elections to their advantage
with impunity, so that artificially created cycles become more and more
common, giving the false impression that cycles are a normal fact of nature.
There's still a question of just how much coordinated strategy will
happen. If the voters are mostly honest, then insisting on strategic
resistance will only be giving up honest performance for nothing
important in return. On the other hand, something like Borda obviously
collapses because it can't handle any kind of strategy.
I suspect that the initial amount of strategy depends on the voters -
that some voters are more inclined to strategize than others. Probably
voters who are used to FPTP would be more strategically inclined,
although I don't have any proof of this (it just seems intuitive). But
Debian used Schulze however many years without having any trouble with
burial (that they could detect, at least), and most places that use STV
nowadays don't seem to have much of a problem with vote management even
though it was pretty common in New York and some Canadian elections that
used to use STV.
In the face of this uncertainty, it's reasonable to want to have a
method that resists strategy well so that it doesn't get repealed after
a disastrous result. But that doesn't mean that it's strictly necessary
- only that we can't tell if it is, and we only get one shot.
-km
On 28.12.2021 06:56, Forest Simmons wrote:
> Robert,
>
> You wrote ...
>
> "I'm just a Condorcet guy. How cycles get resolved is less motivating
> to me than insuring that the Condorcet winner is always elected"
>
> But "how cycles get resolved" has a big influence on whether or not they
> come into existence. And when these cycles are created, the sincere
> Condorcet Winner goes out the window ... no longer showing up as a
> "beats-all" candidate on the ballot set. Can the cycle resolution method
> reconstruct the lost CW? All bets are off.
>
> The easier it is to game the cycle resolution method, the more incentive
> for the gamers to create the cycles.
>
> It seems that most Condorcet cycles are artificially created.
>
> For example, one way to create a cycle is by an insincere rank reversal
> technique called "burial".
>
> If the cycle resolution method has no built in disincentive/negative
> feedback for this (or any other) kind of cycle creation, over time the
> gamers find out that they can manipulate elections to their advantage
> with impunity, so that artificially created cycles become more and more
> common, giving the false impression that cycles are a normal fact of nature.
There's still a question of just how much coordinated strategy will
happen. If the voters are mostly honest, then insisting on strategic
resistance will only be giving up honest performance for nothing
important in return. On the other hand, something like Borda obviously
collapses because it can't handle *any* kind of strategy.
I suspect that the initial amount of strategy depends on the voters -
that some voters are more inclined to strategize than others. Probably
voters who are used to FPTP would be more strategically inclined,
although I don't have any proof of this (it just seems intuitive). But
Debian used Schulze however many years without having any trouble with
burial (that they could detect, at least), and most places that use STV
nowadays don't seem to have much of a problem with vote management even
though it was pretty common in New York and some Canadian elections that
used to use STV.
In the face of this uncertainty, it's reasonable to want to have a
method that resists strategy well so that it doesn't get repealed after
a disastrous result. But that doesn't mean that it's strictly necessary
- only that we can't tell if it is, and we only get one shot.
-km
FS
Forest Simmons
Wed, Dec 29, 2021 2:55 AM
I agree with Kristofer .... as he said, "... we only get one shot ..."
So why take any unnecessary chances?
And truly the risk is unnecessary, because there are many perfectly good
manipulation resistant methods that are uniformly better and much simpler
than the 2nd rate kluges that, out of ignorance, are routinely proposed.
We need to educate the teachable, while advocating only for the best
possible methods.
Let the reactionary pooh-bahs defend their pet recycled 2nd rate methods
... leave to them the opportunity to reveal their own ignorance and
arrogant disregard for what we has been learned in the last 25 years
(thanks to Rob Lanphier's cultivation of nitty-gritty election science) ...
about election methods in general and Condorcet methods in particular.
El mar., 28 de dic. de 2021 1:55 a. m., Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
km_elmet@t-online.de> escribió:
On 28.12.2021 06:56, Forest Simmons wrote:
Robert,
You wrote ...
"I'm just a Condorcet guy. How cycles get resolved is less motivating
to me than insuring that the Condorcet winner is always elected"
But "how cycles get resolved" has a big influence on whether or not they
come into existence. And when these cycles are created, the sincere
Condorcet Winner goes out the window ... no longer showing up as a
"beats-all" candidate on the ballot set. Can the cycle resolution method
reconstruct the lost CW? All bets are off.
The easier it is to game the cycle resolution method, the more incentive
for the gamers to create the cycles.
It seems that most Condorcet cycles are artificially created.
For example, one way to create a cycle is by an insincere rank reversal
technique called "burial".
If the cycle resolution method has no built in disincentive/negative
feedback for this (or any other) kind of cycle creation, over time the
gamers find out that they can manipulate elections to their advantage
with impunity, so that artificially created cycles become more and more
common, giving the false impression that cycles are a normal fact of
nature.
There's still a question of just how much coordinated strategy will
happen. If the voters are mostly honest, then insisting on strategic
resistance will only be giving up honest performance for nothing
important in return. On the other hand, something like Borda obviously
collapses because it can't handle any kind of strategy.
I suspect that the initial amount of strategy depends on the voters -
that some voters are more inclined to strategize than others. Probably
voters who are used to FPTP would be more strategically inclined,
although I don't have any proof of this (it just seems intuitive). But
Debian used Schulze however many years without having any trouble with
burial (that they could detect, at least), and most places that use STV
nowadays don't seem to have much of a problem with vote management even
though it was pretty common in New York and some Canadian elections that
used to use STV.
In the face of this uncertainty, it's reasonable to want to have a
method that resists strategy well so that it doesn't get repealed after
a disastrous result. But that doesn't mean that it's strictly necessary
- only that we can't tell if it is, and we only get one shot.
-km
I agree with Kristofer .... as he said, "... we only get one shot ..."
So why take any unnecessary chances?
And truly the risk is unnecessary, because there are many perfectly good
manipulation resistant methods that are uniformly better and much simpler
than the 2nd rate kluges that, out of ignorance, are routinely proposed.
We need to educate the teachable, while advocating only for the best
possible methods.
Let the reactionary pooh-bahs defend their pet recycled 2nd rate methods
... leave to them the opportunity to reveal their own ignorance and
arrogant disregard for what we has been learned in the last 25 years
(thanks to Rob Lanphier's cultivation of nitty-gritty election science) ...
about election methods in general and Condorcet methods in particular.
El mar., 28 de dic. de 2021 1:55 a. m., Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
km_elmet@t-online.de> escribió:
> On 28.12.2021 06:56, Forest Simmons wrote:
> > Robert,
> >
> > You wrote ...
> >
> > "I'm just a Condorcet guy. How cycles get resolved is less motivating
> > to me than insuring that the Condorcet winner is always elected"
> >
> > But "how cycles get resolved" has a big influence on whether or not they
> > come into existence. And when these cycles are created, the sincere
> > Condorcet Winner goes out the window ... no longer showing up as a
> > "beats-all" candidate on the ballot set. Can the cycle resolution method
> > reconstruct the lost CW? All bets are off.
> >
> > The easier it is to game the cycle resolution method, the more incentive
> > for the gamers to create the cycles.
> >
> > It seems that most Condorcet cycles are artificially created.
> >
> > For example, one way to create a cycle is by an insincere rank reversal
> > technique called "burial".
> >
> > If the cycle resolution method has no built in disincentive/negative
> > feedback for this (or any other) kind of cycle creation, over time the
> > gamers find out that they can manipulate elections to their advantage
> > with impunity, so that artificially created cycles become more and more
> > common, giving the false impression that cycles are a normal fact of
> nature.
>
> There's still a question of just how much coordinated strategy will
> happen. If the voters are mostly honest, then insisting on strategic
> resistance will only be giving up honest performance for nothing
> important in return. On the other hand, something like Borda obviously
> collapses because it can't handle *any* kind of strategy.
>
> I suspect that the initial amount of strategy depends on the voters -
> that some voters are more inclined to strategize than others. Probably
> voters who are used to FPTP would be more strategically inclined,
> although I don't have any proof of this (it just seems intuitive). But
> Debian used Schulze however many years without having any trouble with
> burial (that they could detect, at least), and most places that use STV
> nowadays don't seem to have much of a problem with vote management even
> though it was pretty common in New York and some Canadian elections that
> used to use STV.
>
> In the face of this uncertainty, it's reasonable to want to have a
> method that resists strategy well so that it doesn't get repealed after
> a disastrous result. But that doesn't mean that it's strictly necessary
> - only that we can't tell if it is, and we only get one shot.
>
> -km
>
RB
robert bristow-johnson
Wed, Dec 29, 2021 5:11 AM
Hay guys, my paper titled
"The Failure of Instant Runoff Voting to accomplish
the very purpose for which it was adopted:
An object lesson in Burlington Vermont"
has gotten revised, I think, for the last time. I added a little color to it with 6 figures that illustrate the Center Squeeze using specifically the Burlington 2009 numbers (they ain't just hypothetical numbers). It's 15 pages now.
Anyway, if you are so inclined, please take a look at it: https://tinyurl.com/2tety9tj .
There are at least two conventions that the scholarship, debaters, and psephologists practice that I kinda reject. (I do not reserve "STV" to mean multi-winner elections, to me "STV" means a method. And I really hate the square pairwise-defeat matrix that people use. That is really stupid because the number in row R and column C has meaning only in comparison to the number in row C and column R. You should just put those two numbers together as I do in Table 3.) And I use more pedestrian labels for important principles and properties. (Like instead of "IIA", I call it "Avoid the Spoiler effect" or instead of "Condorcet criterion", I call it "Majority rule". And, I know that the root of the phrase "One person, one vote" has to do with redistricting and representation, but the term well applies for the principle of the equality of the votes of the enfranchised. And I consider "strategic voting" to be a little different than "tactical voting".) The original intended audience are voters, media, activists, and legislators in Vermont. I want to educate them that FairVote does not get to define what "RCV" means and what really went wrong in 2009.
But otherwise, I am happy to hear or read critique. But if you're gonna critique my use of "STV" or "One person, one vote" or "Majority rule", I have already had that argument.
I just want Ranked-Choice Voting to be what it is meant to be.
On 12/28/2021 9:55 PM Forest Simmons forest.simmons21@gmail.com wrote:
I agree with Kristofer .... as he said, "... we only get one shot ..."
And I do, too. Even though, in reality, we in Burlington Vermont are getting a second shot at this, which is why I am so dismayed at FairVote's and RCV Resources' refusal to learn anything and just repeat the same mistake in the same jurisdiction where the Hare RCV screwup was the worst and the method promptly repealed. They are depending on people having a short memory or just a poor understanding of the problem.
So why take any unnecessary chances?
Exactly. What would happen in Burlington if we re-adopted the same Hare RCV, then eventually had another failure like we had in 2009? Would Rob Richie and Terry Bouricius just write it off again and call it another "... Highly Successful IRV Election." That kind of arrogance and naked denial makes me angry (it's so very Trump-like) and just more committed to opposing them.
And truly the risk is unnecessary, because there are many perfectly good manipulation resistant methods that are uniformly better and much simpler than the 2nd rate kluges that, out of ignorance, are routinely proposed.
But, the only risk with Condorcet is what to do with a cycle. Even implicit methods that do not need an explicit "Condorcet completion" procedure can be expressed as a two-method system: First see by the simplest method if there is a Condorcet winner, then if not, do something else (the "Condorcet completion" procedure).
The "do something else" else will only happen under very rare circumstances. Of the 440 RCV elections analyzed by FairVote, every one had a Condorcet winner and all but one elected that Condorcet winner.
In my opinion, what is more important regarding "do something else" is that the exception handling be easily understood and accepted by the public, so that it does not appear that the method is sneakily trying to game or throw or steal an election.
We need to educate the teachable, while advocating only for the best possible methods.
What's "best"? Is simplicity and transparency "best"? Or is mathematical resistance to strategy and tactic what is best?
Now, regarding the latter, this is not best, but regarding the former, I believe that the "best" contingency procedure in case of a cycle is to simply elect the plurality winner. People will understand that there was no "Consistent Majority Candidate" (a neologism of my creation, it's better than "Beats-All Candidate") and then we ask them "In that case, which candidate appears to have the greatest voter support?" Ostensibly, it would be the plurality winner.
Let the reactionary pooh-bahs defend their pet recycled 2nd rate methods ... leave to them the opportunity to reveal their own ignorance and arrogant disregard for what we has been learned in the last 25 years (thanks to Rob Lanphier's cultivation of nitty-gritty election science) ... about election methods in general and Condorcet methods in particular.
Yea! I'm on that side. Better include the real-life example of Burlington 2009 for what happens when IRV fails to elect the Condorcet winner. That's an object lesson. Too bad FairVote and some Progressives in Burlington refuse to learn the object lesson.
L8r,
r b-j
On 28.12.2021 06:56, Forest Simmons wrote:
Robert,
You wrote ...
"I'm just a Condorcet guy. How cycles get resolved is less motivating
to me than insuring that the Condorcet winner is always elected"
But "how cycles get resolved" has a big influence on whether or not they
come into existence. And when these cycles are created, the sincere
Condorcet Winner goes out the window ... no longer showing up as a
"beats-all" candidate on the ballot set. Can the cycle resolution method
reconstruct the lost CW? All bets are off.
The easier it is to game the cycle resolution method, the more incentive
for the gamers to create the cycles.
It seems that most Condorcet cycles are artificially created.
For example, one way to create a cycle is by an insincere rank reversal
technique called "burial".
If the cycle resolution method has no built in disincentive/negative
feedback for this (or any other) kind of cycle creation, over time the
gamers find out that they can manipulate elections to their advantage
with impunity, so that artificially created cycles become more and more
common, giving the false impression that cycles are a normal fact of nature.
There's still a question of just how much coordinated strategy will
happen. If the voters are mostly honest, then insisting on strategic
resistance will only be giving up honest performance for nothing
important in return. On the other hand, something like Borda obviously
collapses because it can't handle any kind of strategy.
I suspect that the initial amount of strategy depends on the voters -
that some voters are more inclined to strategize than others. Probably
voters who are used to FPTP would be more strategically inclined,
although I don't have any proof of this (it just seems intuitive). But
Debian used Schulze however many years without having any trouble with
burial (that they could detect, at least), and most places that use STV
nowadays don't seem to have much of a problem with vote management even
though it was pretty common in New York and some Canadian elections that
used to use STV.
In the face of this uncertainty, it's reasonable to want to have a
method that resists strategy well so that it doesn't get repealed after
a disastrous result. But that doesn't mean that it's strictly necessary
- only that we can't tell if it is, and we only get one shot.
-km
Hay guys, my paper titled
"The Failure of Instant Runoff Voting to accomplish
the very purpose for which it was adopted:
An object lesson in Burlington Vermont"
has gotten revised, I think, for the last time. I added a little color to it with 6 figures that illustrate the Center Squeeze using specifically the Burlington 2009 numbers (they ain't just hypothetical numbers). It's 15 pages now.
Anyway, if you are so inclined, please take a look at it: https://tinyurl.com/2tety9tj .
There are at least two conventions that the scholarship, debaters, and psephologists practice that I kinda reject. (I do not reserve "STV" to mean multi-winner elections, to me "STV" means a method. And I really hate the square pairwise-defeat matrix that people use. That is really stupid because the number in row R and column C has meaning only in comparison to the number in row C and column R. You should just put those two numbers together as I do in Table 3.) And I use more pedestrian labels for important principles and properties. (Like instead of "IIA", I call it "Avoid the Spoiler effect" or instead of "Condorcet criterion", I call it "Majority rule". And, I know that the root of the phrase "One person, one vote" has to do with redistricting and representation, but the term well applies for the principle of the equality of the votes of the enfranchised. And I consider "strategic voting" to be a little different than "tactical voting".) The original intended audience are voters, media, activists, and legislators in Vermont. I want to educate them that FairVote does not get to define what "RCV" means and what really went wrong in 2009.
But otherwise, I am happy to hear or read critique. But if you're gonna critique my use of "STV" or "One person, one vote" or "Majority rule", I have already had that argument.
I just want Ranked-Choice Voting to be what it is meant to be.
> On 12/28/2021 9:55 PM Forest Simmons <forest.simmons21@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> I agree with Kristofer .... as he said, "... we only get one shot ..."
>
And I do, too. Even though, in reality, we in Burlington Vermont are getting a second shot at this, which is why I am so dismayed at FairVote's and RCV Resources' refusal to learn anything and just repeat the same mistake in the same jurisdiction where the Hare RCV screwup was the worst and the method promptly repealed. They are depending on people having a short memory or just a poor understanding of the problem.
> So why take any unnecessary chances?
>
Exactly. What would happen in Burlington if we re-adopted the same Hare RCV, then eventually had another failure like we had in 2009? Would Rob Richie and Terry Bouricius just write it off again and call it another "... Highly Successful IRV Election." That kind of arrogance and naked denial makes me angry (it's so very Trump-like) and just more committed to opposing them.
> And truly the risk is unnecessary, because there are many perfectly good manipulation resistant methods that are uniformly better and much simpler than the 2nd rate kluges that, out of ignorance, are routinely proposed.
>
But, the only risk with Condorcet is what to do with a cycle. Even implicit methods that do not need an explicit "Condorcet completion" procedure can be expressed as a two-method system: First see by the simplest method if there is a Condorcet winner, then if not, do something else (the "Condorcet completion" procedure).
The "do something else" else will only happen under very rare circumstances. Of the 440 RCV elections analyzed by FairVote, *every* *one* had a Condorcet winner and all but one elected that Condorcet winner.
In my opinion, what is more important regarding "do something else" is that the exception handling be easily understood *and* *accepted* by the public, so that it does not appear that the method is sneakily trying to game or throw or steal an election.
> We need to educate the teachable, while advocating only for the best possible methods.
>
What's "best"? Is simplicity and transparency "best"? Or is mathematical resistance to strategy and tactic what is best?
Now, regarding the latter, this is not best, but regarding the former, I believe that the "best" contingency procedure in case of a cycle is to simply elect the plurality winner. People will understand that there was no "Consistent Majority Candidate" (a neologism of my creation, it's better than "Beats-All Candidate") and then we ask them "In that case, which candidate appears to have the greatest voter support?" Ostensibly, it would be the plurality winner.
> Let the reactionary pooh-bahs defend their pet recycled 2nd rate methods ... leave to them the opportunity to reveal their own ignorance and arrogant disregard for what we has been learned in the last 25 years (thanks to Rob Lanphier's cultivation of nitty-gritty election science) ... about election methods in general and Condorcet methods in particular.
>
Yea! I'm on that side. Better include the real-life example of Burlington 2009 for what happens when IRV fails to elect the Condorcet winner. That's an object lesson. Too bad FairVote and some Progressives in Burlington refuse to learn the object lesson.
L8r,
r b-j
>
> El mar., 28 de dic. de 2021 1:55 a. m., Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet@t-online.de> escribió:
> > On 28.12.2021 06:56, Forest Simmons wrote:
> > > Robert,
> > >
> > > You wrote ...
> > >
> > > "I'm just a Condorcet guy. How cycles get resolved is less motivating
> > > to me than insuring that the Condorcet winner is always elected"
> > >
> > > But "how cycles get resolved" has a big influence on whether or not they
> > > come into existence. And when these cycles are created, the sincere
> > > Condorcet Winner goes out the window ... no longer showing up as a
> > > "beats-all" candidate on the ballot set. Can the cycle resolution method
> > > reconstruct the lost CW? All bets are off.
> > >
> > > The easier it is to game the cycle resolution method, the more incentive
> > > for the gamers to create the cycles.
> > >
> > > It seems that most Condorcet cycles are artificially created.
> > >
> > > For example, one way to create a cycle is by an insincere rank reversal
> > > technique called "burial".
> > >
> > > If the cycle resolution method has no built in disincentive/negative
> > > feedback for this (or any other) kind of cycle creation, over time the
> > > gamers find out that they can manipulate elections to their advantage
> > > with impunity, so that artificially created cycles become more and more
> > > common, giving the false impression that cycles are a normal fact of nature.
> >
> > There's still a question of just how much coordinated strategy will
> > happen. If the voters are mostly honest, then insisting on strategic
> > resistance will only be giving up honest performance for nothing
> > important in return. On the other hand, something like Borda obviously
> > collapses because it can't handle *any* kind of strategy.
> >
> > I suspect that the initial amount of strategy depends on the voters -
> > that some voters are more inclined to strategize than others. Probably
> > voters who are used to FPTP would be more strategically inclined,
> > although I don't have any proof of this (it just seems intuitive). But
> > Debian used Schulze however many years without having any trouble with
> > burial (that they could detect, at least), and most places that use STV
> > nowadays don't seem to have much of a problem with vote management even
> > though it was pretty common in New York and some Canadian elections that
> > used to use STV.
> >
> > In the face of this uncertainty, it's reasonable to want to have a
> > method that resists strategy well so that it doesn't get repealed after
> > a disastrous result. But that doesn't mean that it's strictly necessary
> > - only that we can't tell if it is, and we only get one shot.
> >
> > -km
> >
--
r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj@audioimagination.com
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
.
.
.
RL
Rob Lanphier
Fri, Dec 31, 2021 1:51 AM
Hi Forest (and everyone else),
I'm going to change the subject, in part because I've only been skimming
this thread (so I want to start a new thread to talk about the tidbit I'm
latching onto), and because I saw some praise from Forest, and I fear he
buried the lede. YES, IT'S ALL ABOUT ME!!!!!! :-D
More inline below...
On Tue, Dec 28, 2021 at 6:55 PM Forest Simmons forest.simmons21@gmail.com
wrote:
I agree with Kristofer .... as he said, "... we only get one shot ..."
So why take any unnecessary chances?
Here's the subject that i'm here to address: I think we get more than one
shot (mildly objecting to Forest and Kristofer here). HOWEVER, as Robert
Bristow-Johnson pointed out in his excellent paper summarizing the lessons
learned from Burlington's mayoral elections since adopting
RCV/IRV/HareRCV/whatever, the old "Texas sharpshooter"1 fallacy comes
into play whenever FairVote celebrates their successes with RCV.
And truly the risk is unnecessary, because there are many perfectly good
manipulation resistant methods that are uniformly better and much simpler
than the 2nd rate kluges that, out of ignorance, are routinely proposed.
I agree. I think we do need to respect and appreciate the need for
end-to-end simplicity in voting methods. As I recall (and I could be
wrong), the problems that Pierce County (in Washington state) had back in
2005 through 2009 when they implemented IRV was that certifiable voting
machines that implement ranked ballots were difficult to come by, and
expensive.
California is STILL having that problem. Moreover, I can tell you (having
lived in San Francisco for over a decade now) that all of this "choice"
that RCV offers comes at a cost. No one knows how to do proper polling for
it, and it takes days (or even weeks) for us to know the results in a close
election. We have to trust that the centrally-tabulated paper ballots have
been counted correctly, and that there isn't a whiff of corruption in the
department of the San Francisco government. While we love to talk about
how small San Francisco is (geographically speaking), the city's revenues
appear to have grown to over $12 billion (USD) per year:
https://sfstandard.com/sfs-budget-in-4-charts-the-pandemic-effect-on-city-finances-and-the-prospects-for-recovery/
A government managing that much money is inevitably going to get a little
sloppy about a few things, and grifters will take advantage of some of that
sloppiness.
We need to educate the teachable, while advocating only for the best
Let the reactionary pooh-bahs defend their pet recycled 2nd rate methods
... leave to them the opportunity to reveal their own ignorance and
arrogant disregard for what we has been learned in the last 25 years
(thanks to Rob Lanphier's cultivation of nitty-gritty election science) ...
about election methods in general and Condorcet methods in particular.
I truly appreciate the praise. Thank you. I'm glad I've been able to
provide a space for people with ideas that stand up to academic scrutiny.
I've never been an "academic" myself, and was eager to get out of Idaho
with my bachelors degree, but I've always appreciated learning from people
who understand things better than I do. And almost all y'all who regularly
post to this mailing list understand the mathematics of voting systems
better than I do. I may understand the politics of them better than some
of you, but Forest, you and Kristofer and Kevi Venzke and Steve Eppley and
Mike Ossipoff all understand the math better. I trust Robert
Bristow-Johnson to understand the politics of Burlington, Vermont better
than I do (since he's lived there a little while), but I'm going to guess
we both have political advice to offer each other. (Robert: you and I
should work on a YouTube video associated with your paper; let me know if
you'd like to try that).
Regardless, you're absolutely correct about one thing, Forest: we need to
"educate the teachable". I think one thing that the participants of this
mailing list from the academic sector sometimes forget is that we don't get
to say "listen carefully; this will be on the test."
I think a New Year's Resolution for all of us to consider is to hone our
respective elevator pitches for electoral reform. I'm going to refer folks
to the "elevator pitch" Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevator_pitch
In particular, it says it should be in "the time span of an elevator ride,
or approximately thirty seconds to two minutes". I would like to add that
we need to make sure that the recipient doesn't feel trapped on the
elevator with us as we berate them for two minutes without allowing for
questions, but instead make eye contact, and gauge receptiveness by being
ready to answer questions (and make them feel like their questions are
smart questions, rather than questions we've had to answer five million
times, even though.... they probably are asking questions that we've had to
answer five million times by now). We should have our 30-second answers
for five to ten frequently asked questions memorized, and hone them so that
we don't bore the recipient to tears getting around to the point we feel we
need to make.
That'll certainly be my New Year's resolution. The whole point of the
"elevator pitch" metaphor is that sometimes, you only get one shot to be
standing alone in an elevator with a key investor, and you only have
30-seconds to convince them that your loopy idea for a company is worth
investing in. My explanations for electoral reform have never been crisp
enough, and I think I'd like to change that. I hope all y'all can help me
out with that.
Rob
El mar., 28 de dic. de 2021 1:55 a. m., Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
On 28.12.2021 06:56, Forest Simmons wrote:
Robert,
You wrote ...
"I'm just a Condorcet guy. How cycles get resolved is less motivating
to me than insuring that the Condorcet winner is always elected"
But "how cycles get resolved" has a big influence on whether or not
come into existence. And when these cycles are created, the sincere
Condorcet Winner goes out the window ... no longer showing up as a
"beats-all" candidate on the ballot set. Can the cycle resolution
reconstruct the lost CW? All bets are off.
The easier it is to game the cycle resolution method, the more
for the gamers to create the cycles.
It seems that most Condorcet cycles are artificially created.
For example, one way to create a cycle is by an insincere rank reversal
technique called "burial".
If the cycle resolution method has no built in disincentive/negative
feedback for this (or any other) kind of cycle creation, over time the
gamers find out that they can manipulate elections to their advantage
with impunity, so that artificially created cycles become more and more
common, giving the false impression that cycles are a normal fact of
There's still a question of just how much coordinated strategy will
happen. If the voters are mostly honest, then insisting on strategic
resistance will only be giving up honest performance for nothing
important in return. On the other hand, something like Borda obviously
collapses because it can't handle any kind of strategy.
I suspect that the initial amount of strategy depends on the voters -
that some voters are more inclined to strategize than others. Probably
voters who are used to FPTP would be more strategically inclined,
although I don't have any proof of this (it just seems intuitive). But
Debian used Schulze however many years without having any trouble with
burial (that they could detect, at least), and most places that use STV
nowadays don't seem to have much of a problem with vote management even
though it was pretty common in New York and some Canadian elections that
used to use STV.
In the face of this uncertainty, it's reasonable to want to have a
method that resists strategy well so that it doesn't get repealed after
a disastrous result. But that doesn't mean that it's strictly necessary
- only that we can't tell if it is, and we only get one shot.
-km
Hi Forest (and everyone else),
I'm going to change the subject, in part because I've only been skimming
this thread (so I want to start a new thread to talk about the tidbit I'm
latching onto), and because I saw some praise from Forest, and I fear he
buried the lede. YES, IT'S ALL ABOUT ME!!!!!! :-D
More inline below...
On Tue, Dec 28, 2021 at 6:55 PM Forest Simmons <forest.simmons21@gmail.com>
wrote:
> I agree with Kristofer .... as he said, "... we only get one shot ..."
>
> So why take any unnecessary chances?
Here's the subject that i'm here to address: I think we get more than one
shot (mildly objecting to Forest and Kristofer here). HOWEVER, as Robert
Bristow-Johnson pointed out in his excellent paper summarizing the lessons
learned from Burlington's mayoral elections since adopting
RCV/IRV/HareRCV/whatever, the old "Texas sharpshooter"[1] fallacy comes
into play whenever FairVote celebrates their successes with RCV.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy
> And truly the risk is unnecessary, because there are many perfectly good
manipulation resistant methods that are uniformly better and much simpler
than the 2nd rate kluges that, out of ignorance, are routinely proposed.
I agree. I think we do need to respect and appreciate the need for
end-to-end simplicity in voting methods. As I recall (and I could be
wrong), the problems that Pierce County (in Washington state) had back in
2005 through 2009 when they implemented IRV was that certifiable voting
machines that implement ranked ballots were difficult to come by, and
expensive.
California is STILL having that problem. Moreover, I can tell you (having
lived in San Francisco for over a decade now) that all of this "choice"
that RCV offers comes at a cost. No one knows how to do proper polling for
it, and it takes days (or even weeks) for us to know the results in a close
election. We have to trust that the centrally-tabulated paper ballots have
been counted correctly, and that there isn't a whiff of corruption in the
department of the San Francisco government. While we love to talk about
how small San Francisco is (geographically speaking), the city's revenues
appear to have grown to over $12 billion (USD) per year:
https://sfstandard.com/sfs-budget-in-4-charts-the-pandemic-effect-on-city-finances-and-the-prospects-for-recovery/
A government managing that much money is inevitably going to get a little
sloppy about a few things, and grifters will take advantage of some of that
sloppiness.
>
> We need to educate the teachable, while advocating only for the best
possible methods.
>
> Let the reactionary pooh-bahs defend their pet recycled 2nd rate methods
... leave to them the opportunity to reveal their own ignorance and
arrogant disregard for what we has been learned in the last 25 years
(thanks to Rob Lanphier's cultivation of nitty-gritty election science) ...
about election methods in general and Condorcet methods in particular.
I truly appreciate the praise. Thank you. I'm glad I've been able to
provide a space for people with ideas that stand up to academic scrutiny.
I've never been an "academic" myself, and was eager to get out of Idaho
with my bachelors degree, but I've always appreciated learning from people
who understand things better than I do. And almost all y'all who regularly
post to this mailing list understand the mathematics of voting systems
better than I do. I may understand the politics of them better than some
of you, but Forest, you and Kristofer and Kevi Venzke and Steve Eppley and
Mike Ossipoff all understand the math better. I trust Robert
Bristow-Johnson to understand the politics of Burlington, Vermont better
than I do (since he's lived there a little while), but I'm going to guess
we both have political advice to offer each other. (Robert: you and I
should work on a YouTube video associated with your paper; let me know if
you'd like to try that).
Regardless, you're absolutely correct about one thing, Forest: we need to
"educate the teachable". I think one thing that the participants of this
mailing list from the academic sector sometimes forget is that we don't get
to say "listen carefully; this will be on the test."
I think a New Year's Resolution for all of us to consider is to hone our
respective elevator pitches for electoral reform. I'm going to refer folks
to the "elevator pitch" Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevator_pitch
In particular, it says it should be in "the time span of an elevator ride,
or approximately thirty seconds to two minutes". I would like to add that
we need to make sure that the recipient doesn't feel trapped on the
elevator with us as we berate them for two minutes without allowing for
questions, but instead make eye contact, and gauge receptiveness by being
ready to answer questions (and make them feel like their questions are
smart questions, rather than questions we've had to answer five million
times, even though.... they probably are asking questions that we've had to
answer five million times by now). We should have our 30-second answers
for five to ten frequently asked questions memorized, and hone them so that
we don't bore the recipient to tears getting around to the point we feel we
need to make.
That'll certainly be my New Year's resolution. The whole point of the
"elevator pitch" metaphor is that sometimes, you only get one shot to be
standing alone in an elevator with a key investor, and you only have
30-seconds to convince them that your loopy idea for a company is worth
investing in. My explanations for electoral reform have never been crisp
enough, and I think I'd like to change that. I hope all y'all can help me
out with that.
Rob
>
> El mar., 28 de dic. de 2021 1:55 a. m., Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
km_elmet@t-online.de> escribió:
>>
>> On 28.12.2021 06:56, Forest Simmons wrote:
>> > Robert,
>> >
>> > You wrote ...
>> >
>> > "I'm just a Condorcet guy. How cycles get resolved is less motivating
>> > to me than insuring that the Condorcet winner is always elected"
>> >
>> > But "how cycles get resolved" has a big influence on whether or not
they
>> > come into existence. And when these cycles are created, the sincere
>> > Condorcet Winner goes out the window ... no longer showing up as a
>> > "beats-all" candidate on the ballot set. Can the cycle resolution
method
>> > reconstruct the lost CW? All bets are off.
>> >
>> > The easier it is to game the cycle resolution method, the more
incentive
>> > for the gamers to create the cycles.
>> >
>> > It seems that most Condorcet cycles are artificially created.
>> >
>> > For example, one way to create a cycle is by an insincere rank reversal
>> > technique called "burial".
>> >
>>
>> > If the cycle resolution method has no built in disincentive/negative
>> > feedback for this (or any other) kind of cycle creation, over time the
>> > gamers find out that they can manipulate elections to their advantage
>> > with impunity, so that artificially created cycles become more and more
>> > common, giving the false impression that cycles are a normal fact of
nature.
>>
>> There's still a question of just how much coordinated strategy will
>> happen. If the voters are mostly honest, then insisting on strategic
>> resistance will only be giving up honest performance for nothing
>> important in return. On the other hand, something like Borda obviously
>> collapses because it can't handle *any* kind of strategy.
>>
>> I suspect that the initial amount of strategy depends on the voters -
>> that some voters are more inclined to strategize than others. Probably
>> voters who are used to FPTP would be more strategically inclined,
>> although I don't have any proof of this (it just seems intuitive). But
>> Debian used Schulze however many years without having any trouble with
>> burial (that they could detect, at least), and most places that use STV
>> nowadays don't seem to have much of a problem with vote management even
>> though it was pretty common in New York and some Canadian elections that
>> used to use STV.
>>
>> In the face of this uncertainty, it's reasonable to want to have a
>> method that resists strategy well so that it doesn't get repealed after
>> a disastrous result. But that doesn't mean that it's strictly necessary
>> - only that we can't tell if it is, and we only get one shot.
>>
>> -km
>
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
info
FS
Forest Simmons
Fri, Dec 31, 2021 8:03 AM
Amen to everything Rob pointed out especially the kudos to Robert for his
yeoman's service in single handedly composing a persuasive and urgent
message to all stake holders in the Burlington, VT election method choice.
We all agree that simplicity is of utmost importance ... simplicity of the
method, simplicity and clarity of our explanations, etc.
Robert's proposal certainly passes the simplicity test ... elect the
candidate that has majority preference (among those weighing in) in every
head-to-head contest ... and in the vanishingly rare case that no candidate
satisfies that description, elect the candidate ranked first on the most
ballots.
Yes, perfect for the general public, the politicians, and other voters ...
but an easy target for the usual FairVote detractors. ... too easy for them
to point out that unlike IRV, this method can elect the Universal Pairwise
Loser .... the majority Loser in every head-to-head contest.
But the fix is easy ... instead of saying " ...elect the candidate ranked
first on the most ballots ..." just say "...elect the majority winner
between the top two vote getters .."
[however you want to describe the instant top two runoff].
People are already used to the idea of top two runoff when there is no
majority winner ... and the pairwise information is already there for the
instant version ... no need for a separate poll!
-FWS
El jue., 30 de dic. de 2021 5:52 p. m., Rob Lanphier roblan@gmail.com
escribió:
Hi Forest (and everyone else),
I'm going to change the subject, in part because I've only been skimming
this thread (so I want to start a new thread to talk about the tidbit I'm
latching onto), and because I saw some praise from Forest, and I fear he
buried the lede. YES, IT'S ALL ABOUT ME!!!!!! :-D
More inline below...
On Tue, Dec 28, 2021 at 6:55 PM Forest Simmons forest.simmons21@gmail.com
wrote:
I agree with Kristofer .... as he said, "... we only get one shot ..."
So why take any unnecessary chances?
Here's the subject that i'm here to address: I think we get more than one
shot (mildly objecting to Forest and Kristofer here). HOWEVER, as Robert
Bristow-Johnson pointed out in his excellent paper summarizing the lessons
learned from Burlington's mayoral elections since adopting
RCV/IRV/HareRCV/whatever, the old "Texas sharpshooter"1 fallacy comes
into play whenever FairVote celebrates their successes with RCV.
And truly the risk is unnecessary, because there are many perfectly good
manipulation resistant methods that are uniformly better and much simpler
than the 2nd rate kluges that, out of ignorance, are routinely proposed.
I agree. I think we do need to respect and appreciate the need for
end-to-end simplicity in voting methods. As I recall (and I could be
wrong), the problems that Pierce County (in Washington state) had back in
2005 through 2009 when they implemented IRV was that certifiable voting
machines that implement ranked ballots were difficult to come by, and
expensive.
California is STILL having that problem. Moreover, I can tell you (having
lived in San Francisco for over a decade now) that all of this "choice"
that RCV offers comes at a cost. No one knows how to do proper polling for
it, and it takes days (or even weeks) for us to know the results in a close
election. We have to trust that the centrally-tabulated paper ballots have
been counted correctly, and that there isn't a whiff of corruption in the
department of the San Francisco government. While we love to talk about
how small San Francisco is (geographically speaking), the city's revenues
appear to have grown to over $12 billion (USD) per year:
https://sfstandard.com/sfs-budget-in-4-charts-the-pandemic-effect-on-city-finances-and-the-prospects-for-recovery/
A government managing that much money is inevitably going to get a little
sloppy about a few things, and grifters will take advantage of some of that
sloppiness.
We need to educate the teachable, while advocating only for the best
Let the reactionary pooh-bahs defend their pet recycled 2nd rate methods
... leave to them the opportunity to reveal their own ignorance and
arrogant disregard for what we has been learned in the last 25 years
(thanks to Rob Lanphier's cultivation of nitty-gritty election science) ...
about election methods in general and Condorcet methods in particular.
I truly appreciate the praise. Thank you. I'm glad I've been able to
provide a space for people with ideas that stand up to academic scrutiny.
I've never been an "academic" myself, and was eager to get out of Idaho
with my bachelors degree, but I've always appreciated learning from people
who understand things better than I do. And almost all y'all who regularly
post to this mailing list understand the mathematics of voting systems
better than I do. I may understand the politics of them better than some
of you, but Forest, you and Kristofer and Kevi Venzke and Steve Eppley and
Mike Ossipoff all understand the math better. I trust Robert
Bristow-Johnson to understand the politics of Burlington, Vermont better
than I do (since he's lived there a little while), but I'm going to guess
we both have political advice to offer each other. (Robert: you and I
should work on a YouTube video associated with your paper; let me know if
you'd like to try that).
Regardless, you're absolutely correct about one thing, Forest: we need to
"educate the teachable". I think one thing that the participants of this
mailing list from the academic sector sometimes forget is that we don't get
to say "listen carefully; this will be on the test."
I think a New Year's Resolution for all of us to consider is to hone our
respective elevator pitches for electoral reform. I'm going to refer folks
to the "elevator pitch" Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevator_pitch
In particular, it says it should be in "the time span of an elevator ride,
or approximately thirty seconds to two minutes". I would like to add that
we need to make sure that the recipient doesn't feel trapped on the
elevator with us as we berate them for two minutes without allowing for
questions, but instead make eye contact, and gauge receptiveness by being
ready to answer questions (and make them feel like their questions are
smart questions, rather than questions we've had to answer five million
times, even though.... they probably are asking questions that we've had to
answer five million times by now). We should have our 30-second answers
for five to ten frequently asked questions memorized, and hone them so that
we don't bore the recipient to tears getting around to the point we feel we
need to make.
That'll certainly be my New Year's resolution. The whole point of the
"elevator pitch" metaphor is that sometimes, you only get one shot to be
standing alone in an elevator with a key investor, and you only have
30-seconds to convince them that your loopy idea for a company is worth
investing in. My explanations for electoral reform have never been crisp
enough, and I think I'd like to change that. I hope all y'all can help me
out with that.
Rob
El mar., 28 de dic. de 2021 1:55 a. m., Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
On 28.12.2021 06:56, Forest Simmons wrote:
Robert,
You wrote ...
"I'm just a Condorcet guy. How cycles get resolved is less motivating
to me than insuring that the Condorcet winner is always elected"
But "how cycles get resolved" has a big influence on whether or not
come into existence. And when these cycles are created, the sincere
Condorcet Winner goes out the window ... no longer showing up as a
"beats-all" candidate on the ballot set. Can the cycle resolution
reconstruct the lost CW? All bets are off.
The easier it is to game the cycle resolution method, the more
for the gamers to create the cycles.
It seems that most Condorcet cycles are artificially created.
For example, one way to create a cycle is by an insincere rank
technique called "burial".
If the cycle resolution method has no built in disincentive/negative
feedback for this (or any other) kind of cycle creation, over time the
gamers find out that they can manipulate elections to their advantage
with impunity, so that artificially created cycles become more and
common, giving the false impression that cycles are a normal fact of
There's still a question of just how much coordinated strategy will
happen. If the voters are mostly honest, then insisting on strategic
resistance will only be giving up honest performance for nothing
important in return. On the other hand, something like Borda obviously
collapses because it can't handle any kind of strategy.
I suspect that the initial amount of strategy depends on the voters -
that some voters are more inclined to strategize than others. Probably
voters who are used to FPTP would be more strategically inclined,
although I don't have any proof of this (it just seems intuitive). But
Debian used Schulze however many years without having any trouble with
burial (that they could detect, at least), and most places that use STV
nowadays don't seem to have much of a problem with vote management even
though it was pretty common in New York and some Canadian elections that
used to use STV.
In the face of this uncertainty, it's reasonable to want to have a
method that resists strategy well so that it doesn't get repealed after
a disastrous result. But that doesn't mean that it's strictly necessary
- only that we can't tell if it is, and we only get one shot.
-km
Amen to everything Rob pointed out especially the kudos to Robert for his
yeoman's service in single handedly composing a persuasive and urgent
message to all stake holders in the Burlington, VT election method choice.
We all agree that simplicity is of utmost importance ... simplicity of the
method, simplicity and clarity of our explanations, etc.
Robert's proposal certainly passes the simplicity test ... elect the
candidate that has majority preference (among those weighing in) in every
head-to-head contest ... and in the vanishingly rare case that no candidate
satisfies that description, elect the candidate ranked first on the most
ballots.
Yes, perfect for the general public, the politicians, and other voters ...
but an easy target for the usual FairVote detractors. ... too easy for them
to point out that unlike IRV, this method can elect the Universal Pairwise
Loser .... the majority Loser in every head-to-head contest.
But the fix is easy ... instead of saying " ...elect the candidate ranked
first on the most ballots ..." just say "...elect the majority winner
between the top two vote getters .."
[however you want to describe the instant top two runoff].
People are already used to the idea of top two runoff when there is no
majority winner ... and the pairwise information is already there for the
instant version ... no need for a separate poll!
-FWS
El jue., 30 de dic. de 2021 5:52 p. m., Rob Lanphier <roblan@gmail.com>
escribió:
> Hi Forest (and everyone else),
>
> I'm going to change the subject, in part because I've only been skimming
> this thread (so I want to start a new thread to talk about the tidbit I'm
> latching onto), and because I saw some praise from Forest, and I fear he
> buried the lede. YES, IT'S ALL ABOUT ME!!!!!! :-D
>
> More inline below...
>
> On Tue, Dec 28, 2021 at 6:55 PM Forest Simmons <forest.simmons21@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > I agree with Kristofer .... as he said, "... we only get one shot ..."
> >
> > So why take any unnecessary chances?
>
> Here's the subject that i'm here to address: I think we get more than one
> shot (mildly objecting to Forest and Kristofer here). HOWEVER, as Robert
> Bristow-Johnson pointed out in his excellent paper summarizing the lessons
> learned from Burlington's mayoral elections since adopting
> RCV/IRV/HareRCV/whatever, the old "Texas sharpshooter"[1] fallacy comes
> into play whenever FairVote celebrates their successes with RCV.
>
> [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy
>
> > And truly the risk is unnecessary, because there are many perfectly good
> manipulation resistant methods that are uniformly better and much simpler
> than the 2nd rate kluges that, out of ignorance, are routinely proposed.
>
> I agree. I think we do need to respect and appreciate the need for
> end-to-end simplicity in voting methods. As I recall (and I could be
> wrong), the problems that Pierce County (in Washington state) had back in
> 2005 through 2009 when they implemented IRV was that certifiable voting
> machines that implement ranked ballots were difficult to come by, and
> expensive.
>
> California is STILL having that problem. Moreover, I can tell you (having
> lived in San Francisco for over a decade now) that all of this "choice"
> that RCV offers comes at a cost. No one knows how to do proper polling for
> it, and it takes days (or even weeks) for us to know the results in a close
> election. We have to trust that the centrally-tabulated paper ballots have
> been counted correctly, and that there isn't a whiff of corruption in the
> department of the San Francisco government. While we love to talk about
> how small San Francisco is (geographically speaking), the city's revenues
> appear to have grown to over $12 billion (USD) per year:
>
> https://sfstandard.com/sfs-budget-in-4-charts-the-pandemic-effect-on-city-finances-and-the-prospects-for-recovery/
>
> A government managing that much money is inevitably going to get a little
> sloppy about a few things, and grifters will take advantage of some of that
> sloppiness.
>
> >
> > We need to educate the teachable, while advocating only for the best
> possible methods.
> >
> > Let the reactionary pooh-bahs defend their pet recycled 2nd rate methods
> ... leave to them the opportunity to reveal their own ignorance and
> arrogant disregard for what we has been learned in the last 25 years
> (thanks to Rob Lanphier's cultivation of nitty-gritty election science) ...
> about election methods in general and Condorcet methods in particular.
>
> I truly appreciate the praise. Thank you. I'm glad I've been able to
> provide a space for people with ideas that stand up to academic scrutiny.
> I've never been an "academic" myself, and was eager to get out of Idaho
> with my bachelors degree, but I've always appreciated learning from people
> who understand things better than I do. And almost all y'all who regularly
> post to this mailing list understand the mathematics of voting systems
> better than I do. I may understand the politics of them better than some
> of you, but Forest, you and Kristofer and Kevi Venzke and Steve Eppley and
> Mike Ossipoff all understand the math better. I trust Robert
> Bristow-Johnson to understand the politics of Burlington, Vermont better
> than I do (since he's lived there a little while), but I'm going to guess
> we both have political advice to offer each other. (Robert: you and I
> should work on a YouTube video associated with your paper; let me know if
> you'd like to try that).
>
> Regardless, you're absolutely correct about one thing, Forest: we need to
> "educate the teachable". I think one thing that the participants of this
> mailing list from the academic sector sometimes forget is that we don't get
> to say "listen carefully; this will be on the test."
>
> I think a New Year's Resolution for all of us to consider is to hone our
> respective elevator pitches for electoral reform. I'm going to refer folks
> to the "elevator pitch" Wikipedia article:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevator_pitch
>
> In particular, it says it should be in "the time span of an elevator ride,
> or approximately thirty seconds to two minutes". I would like to add that
> we need to make sure that the recipient doesn't feel trapped on the
> elevator with us as we berate them for two minutes without allowing for
> questions, but instead make eye contact, and gauge receptiveness by being
> ready to answer questions (and make them feel like their questions are
> smart questions, rather than questions we've had to answer five million
> times, even though.... they probably are asking questions that we've had to
> answer five million times by now). We should have our 30-second answers
> for five to ten frequently asked questions memorized, and hone them so that
> we don't bore the recipient to tears getting around to the point we feel we
> need to make.
>
> That'll certainly be my New Year's resolution. The whole point of the
> "elevator pitch" metaphor is that sometimes, you only get one shot to be
> standing alone in an elevator with a key investor, and you only have
> 30-seconds to convince them that your loopy idea for a company is worth
> investing in. My explanations for electoral reform have never been crisp
> enough, and I think I'd like to change that. I hope all y'all can help me
> out with that.
>
> Rob
>
>
> >
> > El mar., 28 de dic. de 2021 1:55 a. m., Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
> km_elmet@t-online.de> escribió:
> >>
> >> On 28.12.2021 06:56, Forest Simmons wrote:
> >> > Robert,
> >> >
> >> > You wrote ...
> >> >
> >> > "I'm just a Condorcet guy. How cycles get resolved is less motivating
> >> > to me than insuring that the Condorcet winner is always elected"
> >> >
> >> > But "how cycles get resolved" has a big influence on whether or not
> they
> >> > come into existence. And when these cycles are created, the sincere
> >> > Condorcet Winner goes out the window ... no longer showing up as a
> >> > "beats-all" candidate on the ballot set. Can the cycle resolution
> method
> >> > reconstruct the lost CW? All bets are off.
> >> >
> >> > The easier it is to game the cycle resolution method, the more
> incentive
> >> > for the gamers to create the cycles.
> >> >
> >> > It seems that most Condorcet cycles are artificially created.
> >> >
> >> > For example, one way to create a cycle is by an insincere rank
> reversal
> >> > technique called "burial".
> >> >
>
>
> >>
> >> > If the cycle resolution method has no built in disincentive/negative
> >> > feedback for this (or any other) kind of cycle creation, over time the
> >> > gamers find out that they can manipulate elections to their advantage
> >> > with impunity, so that artificially created cycles become more and
> more
> >> > common, giving the false impression that cycles are a normal fact of
> nature.
> >>
> >> There's still a question of just how much coordinated strategy will
> >> happen. If the voters are mostly honest, then insisting on strategic
> >> resistance will only be giving up honest performance for nothing
> >> important in return. On the other hand, something like Borda obviously
> >> collapses because it can't handle *any* kind of strategy.
> >>
> >> I suspect that the initial amount of strategy depends on the voters -
> >> that some voters are more inclined to strategize than others. Probably
> >> voters who are used to FPTP would be more strategically inclined,
> >> although I don't have any proof of this (it just seems intuitive). But
> >> Debian used Schulze however many years without having any trouble with
> >> burial (that they could detect, at least), and most places that use STV
> >> nowadays don't seem to have much of a problem with vote management even
> >> though it was pretty common in New York and some Canadian elections that
> >> used to use STV.
> >>
> >> In the face of this uncertainty, it's reasonable to want to have a
> >> method that resists strategy well so that it doesn't get repealed after
> >> a disastrous result. But that doesn't mean that it's strictly necessary
> >> - only that we can't tell if it is, and we only get one shot.
> >>
> >> -km
> >
> > ----
> > Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
> info
>
RL
Richard Lung
Fri, Dec 31, 2021 7:12 PM
A reform has to be based on principle not expediency or an easy fix. The problem with all these exclusion fixes is that they are not based on an exclusion count, in its own right, as well as an election count in its own right. In short they are all "uninomial" election counts, lacking a binomial election count and exclusion count.
What this means, in practical terms for the present, is that exclusion of candidates is an arbitrary embarrassment, that keeps methodologists in disagreement.
Regards,
Richard Lung.
On 31 Dec 2021, at 8:03 am, Forest Simmons forest.simmons21@gmail.com wrote:
Amen to everything Rob pointed out especially the kudos to Robert for his yeoman's service in single handedly composing a persuasive and urgent message to all stake holders in the Burlington, VT election method choice.
We all agree that simplicity is of utmost importance ... simplicity of the method, simplicity and clarity of our explanations, etc.
Robert's proposal certainly passes the simplicity test ... elect the candidate that has majority preference (among those weighing in) in every head-to-head contest ... and in the vanishingly rare case that no candidate satisfies that description, elect the candidate ranked first on the most ballots.
Yes, perfect for the general public, the politicians, and other voters ... but an easy target for the usual FairVote detractors. ... too easy for them to point out that unlike IRV, this method can elect the Universal Pairwise Loser .... the majority Loser in every head-to-head contest.
But the fix is easy ... instead of saying " ...elect the candidate ranked first on the most ballots ..." just say "...elect the majority winner between the top two vote getters .."
[however you want to describe the instant top two runoff].
People are already used to the idea of top two runoff when there is no majority winner ... and the pairwise information is already there for the instant version ... no need for a separate poll!
-FWS
El jue., 30 de dic. de 2021 5:52 p. m., Rob Lanphier roblan@gmail.com escribió:
Hi Forest (and everyone else),
I'm going to change the subject, in part because I've only been skimming this thread (so I want to start a new thread to talk about the tidbit I'm latching onto), and because I saw some praise from Forest, and I fear he buried the lede. YES, IT'S ALL ABOUT ME!!!!!! :-D
More inline below...
On Tue, Dec 28, 2021 at 6:55 PM Forest Simmons forest.simmons21@gmail.com wrote:
I agree with Kristofer .... as he said, "... we only get one shot ..."
So why take any unnecessary chances?
Here's the subject that i'm here to address: I think we get more than one shot (mildly objecting to Forest and Kristofer here). HOWEVER, as Robert Bristow-Johnson pointed out in his excellent paper summarizing the lessons learned from Burlington's mayoral elections since adopting RCV/IRV/HareRCV/whatever, the old "Texas sharpshooter"1 fallacy comes into play whenever FairVote celebrates their successes with RCV.
And truly the risk is unnecessary, because there are many perfectly good manipulation resistant methods that are uniformly better and much simpler than the 2nd rate kluges that, out of ignorance, are routinely proposed.
I agree. I think we do need to respect and appreciate the need for end-to-end simplicity in voting methods. As I recall (and I could be wrong), the problems that Pierce County (in Washington state) had back in 2005 through 2009 when they implemented IRV was that certifiable voting machines that implement ranked ballots were difficult to come by, and expensive.
California is STILL having that problem. Moreover, I can tell you (having lived in San Francisco for over a decade now) that all of this "choice" that RCV offers comes at a cost. No one knows how to do proper polling for it, and it takes days (or even weeks) for us to know the results in a close election. We have to trust that the centrally-tabulated paper ballots have been counted correctly, and that there isn't a whiff of corruption in the department of the San Francisco government. While we love to talk about how small San Francisco is (geographically speaking), the city's revenues appear to have grown to over $12 billion (USD) per year:
https://sfstandard.com/sfs-budget-in-4-charts-the-pandemic-effect-on-city-finances-and-the-prospects-for-recovery/
A government managing that much money is inevitably going to get a little sloppy about a few things, and grifters will take advantage of some of that sloppiness.
We need to educate the teachable, while advocating only for the best possible methods.
Let the reactionary pooh-bahs defend their pet recycled 2nd rate methods ... leave to them the opportunity to reveal their own ignorance and arrogant disregard for what we has been learned in the last 25 years (thanks to Rob Lanphier's cultivation of nitty-gritty election science) ... about election methods in general and Condorcet methods in particular.
I truly appreciate the praise. Thank you. I'm glad I've been able to provide a space for people with ideas that stand up to academic scrutiny. I've never been an "academic" myself, and was eager to get out of Idaho with my bachelors degree, but I've always appreciated learning from people who understand things better than I do. And almost all y'all who regularly post to this mailing list understand the mathematics of voting systems better than I do. I may understand the politics of them better than some of you, but Forest, you and Kristofer and Kevi Venzke and Steve Eppley and Mike Ossipoff all understand the math better. I trust Robert Bristow-Johnson to understand the politics of Burlington, Vermont better than I do (since he's lived there a little while), but I'm going to guess we both have political advice to offer each other. (Robert: you and I should work on a YouTube video associated with your paper; let me know if you'd like to try that).
Regardless, you're absolutely correct about one thing, Forest: we need to "educate the teachable". I think one thing that the participants of this mailing list from the academic sector sometimes forget is that we don't get to say "listen carefully; this will be on the test."
I think a New Year's Resolution for all of us to consider is to hone our respective elevator pitches for electoral reform. I'm going to refer folks to the "elevator pitch" Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevator_pitch
In particular, it says it should be in "the time span of an elevator ride, or approximately thirty seconds to two minutes". I would like to add that we need to make sure that the recipient doesn't feel trapped on the elevator with us as we berate them for two minutes without allowing for questions, but instead make eye contact, and gauge receptiveness by being ready to answer questions (and make them feel like their questions are smart questions, rather than questions we've had to answer five million times, even though.... they probably are asking questions that we've had to answer five million times by now). We should have our 30-second answers for five to ten frequently asked questions memorized, and hone them so that we don't bore the recipient to tears getting around to the point we feel we need to make.
That'll certainly be my New Year's resolution. The whole point of the "elevator pitch" metaphor is that sometimes, you only get one shot to be standing alone in an elevator with a key investor, and you only have 30-seconds to convince them that your loopy idea for a company is worth investing in. My explanations for electoral reform have never been crisp enough, and I think I'd like to change that. I hope all y'all can help me out with that.
Rob
On 28.12.2021 06:56, Forest Simmons wrote:
Robert,
You wrote ...
"I'm just a Condorcet guy. How cycles get resolved is less motivating
to me than insuring that the Condorcet winner is always elected"
But "how cycles get resolved" has a big influence on whether or not they
come into existence. And when these cycles are created, the sincere
Condorcet Winner goes out the window ... no longer showing up as a
"beats-all" candidate on the ballot set. Can the cycle resolution method
reconstruct the lost CW? All bets are off.
The easier it is to game the cycle resolution method, the more incentive
for the gamers to create the cycles.
It seems that most Condorcet cycles are artificially created.
For example, one way to create a cycle is by an insincere rank reversal
technique called "burial".
If the cycle resolution method has no built in disincentive/negative
feedback for this (or any other) kind of cycle creation, over time the
gamers find out that they can manipulate elections to their advantage
with impunity, so that artificially created cycles become more and more
common, giving the false impression that cycles are a normal fact of nature.
There's still a question of just how much coordinated strategy will
happen. If the voters are mostly honest, then insisting on strategic
resistance will only be giving up honest performance for nothing
important in return. On the other hand, something like Borda obviously
collapses because it can't handle any kind of strategy.
I suspect that the initial amount of strategy depends on the voters -
that some voters are more inclined to strategize than others. Probably
voters who are used to FPTP would be more strategically inclined,
although I don't have any proof of this (it just seems intuitive). But
Debian used Schulze however many years without having any trouble with
burial (that they could detect, at least), and most places that use STV
nowadays don't seem to have much of a problem with vote management even
though it was pretty common in New York and some Canadian elections that
used to use STV.
In the face of this uncertainty, it's reasonable to want to have a
method that resists strategy well so that it doesn't get repealed after
a disastrous result. But that doesn't mean that it's strictly necessary
- only that we can't tell if it is, and we only get one shot.
-km
A reform has to be based on principle not expediency or an easy fix. The problem with all these exclusion fixes is that they are not based on an exclusion count, in its own right, as well as an election count in its own right. In short they are all "uninomial" election counts, lacking a binomial election count and exclusion count.
What this means, in practical terms for the present, is that exclusion of candidates is an arbitrary embarrassment, that keeps methodologists in disagreement.
Regards,
Richard Lung.
On 31 Dec 2021, at 8:03 am, Forest Simmons <forest.simmons21@gmail.com> wrote:
Amen to everything Rob pointed out especially the kudos to Robert for his yeoman's service in single handedly composing a persuasive and urgent message to all stake holders in the Burlington, VT election method choice.
We all agree that simplicity is of utmost importance ... simplicity of the method, simplicity and clarity of our explanations, etc.
Robert's proposal certainly passes the simplicity test ... elect the candidate that has majority preference (among those weighing in) in every head-to-head contest ... and in the vanishingly rare case that no candidate satisfies that description, elect the candidate ranked first on the most ballots.
Yes, perfect for the general public, the politicians, and other voters ... but an easy target for the usual FairVote detractors. ... too easy for them to point out that unlike IRV, this method can elect the Universal Pairwise Loser .... the majority Loser in every head-to-head contest.
But the fix is easy ... instead of saying " ...elect the candidate ranked first on the most ballots ..." just say "...elect the majority winner between the top two vote getters .."
[however you want to describe the instant top two runoff].
People are already used to the idea of top two runoff when there is no majority winner ... and the pairwise information is already there for the instant version ... no need for a separate poll!
-FWS
El jue., 30 de dic. de 2021 5:52 p. m., Rob Lanphier <roblan@gmail.com> escribió:
> Hi Forest (and everyone else),
>
> I'm going to change the subject, in part because I've only been skimming this thread (so I want to start a new thread to talk about the tidbit I'm latching onto), and because I saw some praise from Forest, and I fear he buried the lede. YES, IT'S ALL ABOUT ME!!!!!! :-D
>
> More inline below...
>
> On Tue, Dec 28, 2021 at 6:55 PM Forest Simmons <forest.simmons21@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I agree with Kristofer .... as he said, "... we only get one shot ..."
> >
> > So why take any unnecessary chances?
>
> Here's the subject that i'm here to address: I think we get more than one shot (mildly objecting to Forest and Kristofer here). HOWEVER, as Robert Bristow-Johnson pointed out in his excellent paper summarizing the lessons learned from Burlington's mayoral elections since adopting RCV/IRV/HareRCV/whatever, the old "Texas sharpshooter"[1] fallacy comes into play whenever FairVote celebrates their successes with RCV.
>
> [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy
>
> > And truly the risk is unnecessary, because there are many perfectly good manipulation resistant methods that are uniformly better and much simpler than the 2nd rate kluges that, out of ignorance, are routinely proposed.
>
> I agree. I think we do need to respect and appreciate the need for end-to-end simplicity in voting methods. As I recall (and I could be wrong), the problems that Pierce County (in Washington state) had back in 2005 through 2009 when they implemented IRV was that certifiable voting machines that implement ranked ballots were difficult to come by, and expensive.
>
> California is STILL having that problem. Moreover, I can tell you (having lived in San Francisco for over a decade now) that all of this "choice" that RCV offers comes at a cost. No one knows how to do proper polling for it, and it takes days (or even weeks) for us to know the results in a close election. We have to trust that the centrally-tabulated paper ballots have been counted correctly, and that there isn't a whiff of corruption in the department of the San Francisco government. While we love to talk about how small San Francisco is (geographically speaking), the city's revenues appear to have grown to over $12 billion (USD) per year:
> https://sfstandard.com/sfs-budget-in-4-charts-the-pandemic-effect-on-city-finances-and-the-prospects-for-recovery/
>
> A government managing that much money is inevitably going to get a little sloppy about a few things, and grifters will take advantage of some of that sloppiness.
>
> >
> > We need to educate the teachable, while advocating only for the best possible methods.
> >
> > Let the reactionary pooh-bahs defend their pet recycled 2nd rate methods ... leave to them the opportunity to reveal their own ignorance and arrogant disregard for what we has been learned in the last 25 years (thanks to Rob Lanphier's cultivation of nitty-gritty election science) ... about election methods in general and Condorcet methods in particular.
>
> I truly appreciate the praise. Thank you. I'm glad I've been able to provide a space for people with ideas that stand up to academic scrutiny. I've never been an "academic" myself, and was eager to get out of Idaho with my bachelors degree, but I've always appreciated learning from people who understand things better than I do. And almost all y'all who regularly post to this mailing list understand the mathematics of voting systems better than I do. I may understand the politics of them better than some of you, but Forest, you and Kristofer and Kevi Venzke and Steve Eppley and Mike Ossipoff all understand the math better. I trust Robert Bristow-Johnson to understand the politics of Burlington, Vermont better than I do (since he's lived there a little while), but I'm going to guess we both have political advice to offer each other. (Robert: you and I should work on a YouTube video associated with your paper; let me know if you'd like to try that).
>
> Regardless, you're absolutely correct about one thing, Forest: we need to "educate the teachable". I think one thing that the participants of this mailing list from the academic sector sometimes forget is that we don't get to say "listen carefully; this will be on the test."
>
> I think a New Year's Resolution for all of us to consider is to hone our respective elevator pitches for electoral reform. I'm going to refer folks to the "elevator pitch" Wikipedia article:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevator_pitch
>
> In particular, it says it should be in "the time span of an elevator ride, or approximately thirty seconds to two minutes". I would like to add that we need to make sure that the recipient doesn't feel trapped on the elevator with us as we berate them for two minutes without allowing for questions, but instead make eye contact, and gauge receptiveness by being ready to answer questions (and make them feel like their questions are smart questions, rather than questions we've had to answer five million times, even though.... they probably are asking questions that we've had to answer five million times by now). We should have our 30-second answers for five to ten frequently asked questions memorized, and hone them so that we don't bore the recipient to tears getting around to the point we feel we need to make.
>
> That'll certainly be my New Year's resolution. The whole point of the "elevator pitch" metaphor is that sometimes, you only get one shot to be standing alone in an elevator with a key investor, and you only have 30-seconds to convince them that your loopy idea for a company is worth investing in. My explanations for electoral reform have never been crisp enough, and I think I'd like to change that. I hope all y'all can help me out with that.
>
> Rob
>
>
> >
> > El mar., 28 de dic. de 2021 1:55 a. m., Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet@t-online.de> escribió:
> >>
> >> On 28.12.2021 06:56, Forest Simmons wrote:
> >> > Robert,
> >> >
> >> > You wrote ...
> >> >
> >> > "I'm just a Condorcet guy. How cycles get resolved is less motivating
> >> > to me than insuring that the Condorcet winner is always elected"
> >> >
> >> > But "how cycles get resolved" has a big influence on whether or not they
> >> > come into existence. And when these cycles are created, the sincere
> >> > Condorcet Winner goes out the window ... no longer showing up as a
> >> > "beats-all" candidate on the ballot set. Can the cycle resolution method
> >> > reconstruct the lost CW? All bets are off.
> >> >
> >> > The easier it is to game the cycle resolution method, the more incentive
> >> > for the gamers to create the cycles.
> >> >
> >> > It seems that most Condorcet cycles are artificially created.
> >> >
> >> > For example, one way to create a cycle is by an insincere rank reversal
> >> > technique called "burial".
> >> >
>
>
> >>
> >> > If the cycle resolution method has no built in disincentive/negative
> >> > feedback for this (or any other) kind of cycle creation, over time the
> >> > gamers find out that they can manipulate elections to their advantage
> >> > with impunity, so that artificially created cycles become more and more
> >> > common, giving the false impression that cycles are a normal fact of nature.
> >>
> >> There's still a question of just how much coordinated strategy will
> >> happen. If the voters are mostly honest, then insisting on strategic
> >> resistance will only be giving up honest performance for nothing
> >> important in return. On the other hand, something like Borda obviously
> >> collapses because it can't handle *any* kind of strategy.
> >>
> >> I suspect that the initial amount of strategy depends on the voters -
> >> that some voters are more inclined to strategize than others. Probably
> >> voters who are used to FPTP would be more strategically inclined,
> >> although I don't have any proof of this (it just seems intuitive). But
> >> Debian used Schulze however many years without having any trouble with
> >> burial (that they could detect, at least), and most places that use STV
> >> nowadays don't seem to have much of a problem with vote management even
> >> though it was pretty common in New York and some Canadian elections that
> >> used to use STV.
> >>
> >> In the face of this uncertainty, it's reasonable to want to have a
> >> method that resists strategy well so that it doesn't get repealed after
> >> a disastrous result. But that doesn't mean that it's strictly necessary
> >> - only that we can't tell if it is, and we only get one shot.
> >>
> >> -km
> >
> > ----
> > Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list info
----
Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list info
KM
Kristofer Munsterhjelm
Fri, Dec 31, 2021 9:29 PM
On 31.12.2021 20:12, Richard Lung wrote:
A reform has to be based on principle not expediency or an easy fix. The
problem with all these exclusion fixes is that they are not based on an
exclusion count, in its own right, as well as an election count in its
own right. In short they are all "uninomial" election counts, lacking a
binomial election count and exclusion count.
What this means, in practical terms for the present, is that exclusion
of candidates is an arbitrary embarrassment, that keeps methodologists
in disagreement.
The thread is about methods that, while not the best, may be simple
enough and still not entirely bad. So they may lack theoretical
soundness, but that's not the point. For theoretical soundness we have
the advanced Condorcet methods; those are just either hard to describe
or somewhat opaque in their workings to people not versed in the field
(thinking of River in the latter case here).
In addition, not all methods make use of eliminations (exclusion counts)
to begin with. E.g. minmax doesn't eliminate any candidates, it just
chooses the candidate with the least bad worst defeat.
-km
On 31.12.2021 20:12, Richard Lung wrote:
>
>
> A reform has to be based on principle not expediency or an easy fix. The
> problem with all these exclusion fixes is that they are not based on an
> exclusion count, in its own right, as well as an election count in its
> own right. In short they are all "uninomial" election counts, lacking a
> binomial election count and exclusion count.
> What this means, in practical terms for the present, is that exclusion
> of candidates is an arbitrary embarrassment, that keeps methodologists
> in disagreement.
The thread is about methods that, while not the best, may be simple
enough and still not entirely bad. So they may lack theoretical
soundness, but that's not the point. For theoretical soundness we have
the advanced Condorcet methods; those are just either hard to describe
or somewhat opaque in their workings to people not versed in the field
(thinking of River in the latter case here).
In addition, not all methods make use of eliminations (exclusion counts)
to begin with. E.g. minmax doesn't eliminate any candidates, it just
chooses the candidate with the least bad worst defeat.
-km
DC
Daniel Carrera
Sat, Jan 1, 2022 12:44 AM
Yes, perfect for the general public, the politicians, and other voters ...
but an easy target for the usual FairVote detractors. ... too easy for them
to point out that unlike IRV, this method can elect the Universal Pairwise
Loser .... the majority Loser in every head-to-head contest.
But the fix is easy ... instead of saying " ...elect the candidate
ranked first on the most ballots ..." just say "...elect the majority
winner between the top two vote getters .."
[however you want to describe the instant top two runoff].
People are already used to the idea of top two runoff when there is no
majority winner ... and the pairwise information is already there for the
instant version ... no need for a separate poll!
Yeah. I think a top-two runoff has a nice balance between simplicity /
intuitive appeal while avoiding a reversion to FPTP. Arguably top-two
runoff is the most widely used system that is better than FPTP since it's
used in France and it was famously used in the state of Georgia this year.
It's familiar.
Cheers,
Dr. Daniel Carrera
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Iowa State University
On Fri, Dec 31, 2021 at 2:03 AM Forest Simmons <forest.simmons21@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Yes, perfect for the general public, the politicians, and other voters ...
> but an easy target for the usual FairVote detractors. ... too easy for them
> to point out that unlike IRV, this method can elect the Universal Pairwise
> Loser .... the majority Loser in every head-to-head contest.
>
> But the fix is easy ... instead of saying " ...elect the candidate
> ranked first on the most ballots ..." just say "...elect the majority
> winner between the top two vote getters .."
>
> [however you want to describe the instant top two runoff].
>
> People are already used to the idea of top two runoff when there is no
> majority winner ... and the pairwise information is already there for the
> instant version ... no need for a separate poll!
>
Yeah. I think a top-two runoff has a nice balance between simplicity /
intuitive appeal while avoiding a reversion to FPTP. Arguably top-two
runoff is the most widely used system that is better than FPTP since it's
used in France and it was famously used in the state of Georgia this year.
It's familiar.
Cheers,
--
Dr. Daniel Carrera
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Iowa State University
JG
James Gilmour
Sat, Jan 1, 2022 2:01 PM
Top two runoff may be an improvement over FPTP, but it has very little to commend it.
And I am surprised anyone should quote France as a shining example. Take a look at the results of the Presidential election in 2002, when the top two candidates (both right wing) had a total of only 36.74% of the first round votes because the larger (majority) left wing vote was split across a diversity of candidates who were all excluded from the second round.
So the majority of voters were not represented by a candidate of their choice.
James Gilmour
From: Election-Methods [mailto:election-methods-bounces@lists.electorama.com] On Behalf Of Daniel Carrera
Sent: 01 January 2022 00:45
To: Forest Simmons forest.simmons21@gmail.com
Cc: EM election-methods@lists.electorama.com
Subject: Re: [EM] "we only get one shot" (Re: RCV Challenge)
On Fri, Dec 31, 2021 at 2:03 AM Forest Simmons <forest.simmons21@gmail.com mailto:forest.simmons21@gmail.com > wrote:
Yes, perfect for the general public, the politicians, and other voters ... but an easy target for the usual FairVote detractors. ... too easy for them to point out that unlike IRV, this method can elect the Universal Pairwise Loser .... the majority Loser in every head-to-head contest.
But the fix is easy ... instead of saying " ...elect the candidate ranked first on the most ballots ..." just say "...elect the majority winner between the top two vote getters .."
[however you want to describe the instant top two runoff].
People are already used to the idea of top two runoff when there is no majority winner ... and the pairwise information is already there for the instant version ... no need for a separate poll!
Yeah. I think a top-two runoff has a nice balance between simplicity / intuitive appeal while avoiding a reversion to FPTP. Arguably top-two runoff is the most widely used system that is better than FPTP since it's used in France and it was famously used in the state of Georgia this year. It's familiar.
Cheers,
--
Dr. Daniel Carrera
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Iowa State University
--
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus
Top two runoff may be an improvement over FPTP, but it has very little to commend it.
And I am surprised anyone should quote France as a shining example. Take a look at the results of the Presidential election in 2002, when the top two candidates (both right wing) had a total of only 36.74% of the first round votes because the larger (majority) left wing vote was split across a diversity of candidates who were all excluded from the second round.
So the majority of voters were not represented by a candidate of their choice.
James Gilmour
From: Election-Methods [mailto:election-methods-bounces@lists.electorama.com] On Behalf Of Daniel Carrera
Sent: 01 January 2022 00:45
To: Forest Simmons <forest.simmons21@gmail.com>
Cc: EM <election-methods@lists.electorama.com>
Subject: Re: [EM] "we only get one shot" (Re: RCV Challenge)
On Fri, Dec 31, 2021 at 2:03 AM Forest Simmons <forest.simmons21@gmail.com <mailto:forest.simmons21@gmail.com> > wrote:
Yes, perfect for the general public, the politicians, and other voters ... but an easy target for the usual FairVote detractors. ... too easy for them to point out that unlike IRV, this method can elect the Universal Pairwise Loser .... the majority Loser in every head-to-head contest.
But the fix is easy ... instead of saying " ...elect the candidate ranked first on the most ballots ..." just say "...elect the majority winner between the top two vote getters .."
[however you want to describe the instant top two runoff].
People are already used to the idea of top two runoff when there is no majority winner ... and the pairwise information is already there for the instant version ... no need for a separate poll!
Yeah. I think a top-two runoff has a nice balance between simplicity / intuitive appeal while avoiding a reversion to FPTP. Arguably top-two runoff is the most widely used system that is better than FPTP since it's used in France and it was famously used in the state of Georgia this year. It's familiar.
Cheers,
--
Dr. Daniel Carrera
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Iowa State University
--
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus
RL
Richard Lung
Sat, Jan 1, 2022 3:59 PM
KM,
The passage you've quoted does not contradict your thread theme. The hand count of a binomial count is probably simpler than the elimination methods. Moreover, handcount Binomial STV is theoretically sound but less accurate or thoro than FAB STV.
As far as I know (which isn't far) Condorcet methods are means of cross-checking given methods, rather than a method in their own right.
By the way, the point is that an election method should make use of an exclusion count, as well as an election count.
Richard Lung.
On 31 Dec 2021, at 9:29 pm, Kristofer Munsterhjelm km_elmet@t-online.de wrote:
On 31.12.2021 20:12, Richard Lung wrote:
A reform has to be based on principle not expediency or an easy fix. The
problem with all these exclusion fixes is that they are not based on an
exclusion count, in its own right, as well as an election count in its
own right. In short they are all "uninomial" election counts, lacking a
binomial election count and exclusion count.
What this means, in practical terms for the present, is that exclusion
of candidates is an arbitrary embarrassment, that keeps methodologists
in disagreement.
The thread is about methods that, while not the best, may be simple
enough and still not entirely bad. So they may lack theoretical
soundness, but that's not the point. For theoretical soundness we have
the advanced Condorcet methods; those are just either hard to describe
or somewhat opaque in their workings to people not versed in the field
(thinking of River in the latter case here).
In addition, not all methods make use of eliminations (exclusion counts)
to begin with. E.g. minmax doesn't eliminate any candidates, it just
chooses the candidate with the least bad worst defeat.
-km
KM,
The passage you've quoted does not contradict your thread theme. The hand count of a binomial count is probably simpler than the elimination methods. Moreover, handcount Binomial STV is theoretically sound but less accurate or thoro than FAB STV.
As far as I know (which isn't far) Condorcet methods are means of cross-checking given methods, rather than a method in their own right.
By the way, the point is that an election method should make use of an exclusion count, as well as an election count.
Richard Lung.
On 31 Dec 2021, at 9:29 pm, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet@t-online.de> wrote:
> On 31.12.2021 20:12, Richard Lung wrote:
>
>
> A reform has to be based on principle not expediency or an easy fix. The
> problem with all these exclusion fixes is that they are not based on an
> exclusion count, in its own right, as well as an election count in its
> own right. In short they are all "uninomial" election counts, lacking a
> binomial election count and exclusion count.
> What this means, in practical terms for the present, is that exclusion
> of candidates is an arbitrary embarrassment, that keeps methodologists
> in disagreement.
The thread is about methods that, while not the best, may be simple
enough and still not entirely bad. So they may lack theoretical
soundness, but that's not the point. For theoretical soundness we have
the advanced Condorcet methods; those are just either hard to describe
or somewhat opaque in their workings to people not versed in the field
(thinking of River in the latter case here).
In addition, not all methods make use of eliminations (exclusion counts)
to begin with. E.g. minmax doesn't eliminate any candidates, it just
chooses the candidate with the least bad worst defeat.
-km
