Fwd: Election-Methods Digest, Vol 236, Issue 18
Only if there is a cycle involved. Either the election was in a cycle in
the first place or if the burial strategy is to push the election into a
cycle.If there never ever were any cycles, then Condorcet does not fail.
This is like saying that if there never were any odd numbers, 3 would be an
even number. If Condorcet cycles were mathematically impossible, that would
be great. Sadly, they aren't, so we have to deal with them.
For strategy, the mathematical possibility of a cycle--not its actual
occurrence in a set of results--is what matters, because threatening to
create a cycle is what forces a Condorcet winner's supporters to vote
strategically.
The system you're proposing--where we make cycles impossible--is Borda, not
Condorcet. Saari shows that if you delete every subset of ballots that
forms a cycle, then elect the Condorcet winner, you get Borda. If Condorcet
is "strategyproof unless cycles are involved," then Borda is always
strategy proof, because it's got none of them--but clearly it's not, and
the reason why is because what matters is whether you could,
hypothetically, have a cycle, not whether you actually do.
In reality, cycles are always involved. Sometimes it's a real cycle.
Sometimes it's a theoretical cycle that someone could create, and that
threat gives them leverage.
On Sun, Mar 17, 2024 at 1:06 PM robert bristow-johnson <
rbj@audioimagination.com> wrote:
On 03/16/2024 9:11 PM EDT Closed Limelike Curves <
closed.limelike.curves@gmail.com> wrote:
We don't wanna burden voters with any pressure to vote tactically, do
we? Why are people (equal.vote (http://equal.vote/), CES) promoting
methods that, whenever there are 3 or more candidates, inherently
forces voters to make tactical consideration of how they're going to vote
for their 2nd-favorite candidate?
Every method does this. With 3 candidates all Condorcet methods can
encourage burial.
Only if there is a cycle involved. Either the election was in a cycle in
the first place or if the burial strategy is to push the election into a
cycle.
If there never ever were any cycles, then Condorcet does not fail. No
spoiler, no incentive to vote other than sincerely. If you (the voter)
lose, it's because you're in the minority. If your hated candidate wins,
it's because no other candidate is favored by more voters than this hated
candidate.
BTW, I posted at r/EndFPTP a derived scenario that shows how STAR
fails to disincentivize tactical voting, even with the head-to-head runoff.
https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1bbq6hu/heres_a_good_hypothetical_for_how_star_fails/
I don't see how that's a failure. There's two possibilities here:
- If the votes are honest, I don't see what the problem is. The three
candidates are neck-and-neck and there's not much reason to prefer any.
The Center candidate is the Condorcet Winner and STAR only compares
relative rankings in the runoff. So like IRV, if the Condorcet Winner
gets into the final runoff, the Condorcet Winner will always beat anyone
else there.
The voters supporting Center but who liked Left better than Right would
have done better (like get their candidate elected) by burying Left. (But
at least 6 of them, had 4 of them buried Left, they would cause Right to
win.) So, by even by scoring Left at merely 1, they actually betrayed
their favorite candidate.
The voters supporting Right and who liked Center better than Left (this
would be normal) would have done better (like preventing Left from winning)
by scoring Center a little higher than they did. Had 2 or 3 or 6 of them
scored Center higher, enough for 6 points, then Left would be defeated.
But then they have to betray their favorite candidate and the promise of
STAR is that you don't have to do that. Now, what was hard for the Right
voters in Burlington to accept was that their candidate was never going to
win in any pairwise comparison and that their candidate was the spoiler.
But that was actually the case. Alaska was a little different. Peltola
was always in the lead and there was no "come from behind" victory as
occasionally happens with IRV.
- If the votes are strategic, this seems like terrible strategy on the
part of each group.
NO VOTER should have to strategize. But I explained that if your
preference is A>B>C, why without sophisticated consideration of the
possibilities it makes perfect sense to score your ballot A:5, B:1, C:0.
Makes simple sense, particularly with STAR (and assuming only 3 significant
candidates). The problem is when it's a close 3-way race, then, whether
it's STAR or IRV, then tactical voting might serve a voter's political
interests better than sincere voting. We should prevent that burden of
tactical voting whenever we can. (And we can with the ranked ballot as
long as there is always a Condorcet Winner.)
Why wouldn't you give the center candidate more than 0 stars?
I modeled this after real votes in Burlington 2009. There were 1289 Right
voters (outa 3294) that bullet-voted for Right. There were even 568 Left
voters (outa 2981) that bullet-voted for Left. That's what they did.
Now, unlike STAR, IRV would not have helped the Center voters with any
burying strategy. The problem with both STAR or IRV is with the Right
voters who were told that they can throw their full support behind Right
and not get burned by it. That was clearly not true in Burlington 2009 nor
in Alaska 2022 with IRV and I don't think STAR would have done better.
--
r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj@audioimagination.com
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
.
.
.
VNM-sense means roughly that a 50 is just as good as a 50% chance of a 0 or
100.
VNM is great--if you put it together with the Dutch Book theorems, it
basically gets you to "score voting is the objectively correct voting
system" ;-)
(Except sadly not if you have strategic voters.)
On Sun, Mar 17, 2024 at 6:04 PM Rob Lanphier roblan@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Kristofer,
I have a detailed reply below. In short, I'm still pretty sure Michael
Ossipoff is worth listening to every so often (even though many of his
emails are thoughtless stream-of-consciousness that would get him banned in
most places, and I haven't ruled that out if it becomes clear he's driving
people away). Credible voter models show that approval voting and
Condorcet consistency are practically compatible, even if they aren't
strictly compatible. A system that "computers can count, even if people
can't" is not viable in our lifetimes, because people are more complicated
than computers.
More inline....
On Sun, Mar 17, 2024 at 4:28 AM Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
km_elmet@t-online.de> wrote:
On 2024-03-16 23:57, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
On 03/16/2024 5:52 PM EDT Michael Ossipoff email9648742@gmail.com
wrote:
…& don’t forget that Condorcet, too, has a very
computationally-intensive & computationally-demanding count,
We talked about this before, Michael, when I posted. Because of
Precinct Summability and the decentralization of the tabulation (that
does not exist with Hare IRV), there is no practical bottleneck
of computational burden (like there is with Hare IRV that first
requires the centralization of all individual ballot data).
with the consequent loss of transparency, & difficulty of
security-auditing for count-fraud.
Nope, that's a falsehood. Condorcet is Precinct Summable and those
tallies add up and the original tallies come right outa the same machine
that the ballots go into, just like FPTP. There are no intermediate
steps that are opaque. It's not at all the same problem as with Hare
RCV.
I've got Mike plonked, so I don't see his posts,
That's too bad. Michael is frequently annoying, but he's frequently
correct. This mailing list was started in large part because of a
mailing-list conversation I had with Michael in 1995, where he was being
obnoxious on another list. I thought I'd be able to show that he was a
crank. Turns out he taught me about center squeeze. You should consider
unplonking him.
but I would like to add this:
- If a lack of summability is not a problem, then BTR-IRV isn't that
much more complex than IRV. And at the cost of slightly more complexity
than that, Benham can preserve IRV's strategy resistance and do away
with most of its exit incentive.
Having volunteered as a poll worker for the first time in a city that uses
RCV for some elections, it changed my perspective on election security. I
appreciated how much process there was, but also how much of the process
was shrugged off when it was a little inconvenient.
There weren't any RCV races in the March 5 election here, so I didn't have
to perform any tech support for RCV, but having voted in many RCV races, I
could see what a goat rodeo that can become for poll workers. My hunch is
that the more complicated the election, the easier it would be to have
steps of the process shrugged off as poll workers get frazzled as the day
wears on.
I think "summability" is really just shorthand for "vaguely makes sense
for someone who really really cares about the end result to keep track of
the election in real time". Strict Condorcet methods are admittedly
difficult on this count. Approval is drop-dead simple on this count.
I've become convinced (by simulations and gradual persuasion over the past
decade or so) that approval is good enough.
If computers do the counting, then relatively laborious steps aren't any
problem, as long as the public understands why they're there.
I think that's an easy thing for those of us who are good with computers
to say. Computers are taking over the world, but there's a limit to how
much people trust computers and the people who write the software for
computers. Many people "trust" computers only as far as they can throw a
datacenter. Granted, it's possible to wire up many computers in a small
box that most healthy adults can throw and call that a "datacenter", but
I'm talking about the brick-and-mortar datacenters often placed near power
generation plants. Most people have given up the fight, and welcome our
robot overlords, but our robot overlords don't really care if we understand
elections, and may prefer to do away with elections and take control
themselves. :-)
In seriousness, I'm guessing this mailing list skews heavily "math
literate" in addition to skewing heavily "computer literate", and I think
that those of us that are literate in those way have a hard time relating
to people that aren't as literate in those areas:
BTR-IRV's
safeguarding step follows directly from your concept that "if more
people prefer A to B than vice versa, then B must not be elected".
- If, on the other hand, lack of summability is a problem, then that
disqualifies IRV outright and we're done.
I'm supportive of BTR-IRV, but I'll concede that summability and reporting
results in an easy-to-understand form (in real time) is a big problem. I
think it's important for voters (on election night) to be able to see a
television reporter say "Results from the precincts on the southwest side
of town were just reported, and CandB took the lead over CandA. Let's turn
it over to our analysts at the elections desk to explain what happened!"
The pre-election polling and exit polling should provide a reasonably
understandable explanation. I fear we're due for a lot of election fraud
if most people don't understand what happened (and honestly, having lived
in San Francisco since 2011 and seen how some close elections have turned
out, it wouldn't surprise me at all if there's some consequential electoral
fraud here).
It would seem to me that the only reason one would accept IRV and reject
Condorcet-IRV would be if there's a manual count and the initial O(n^2)
Condorcet matrix calculation is considered too laborious. Or for
marketing reasons.
Why not both? I think that both FairVote and the Center for Election
Science spent years marketing against "nerds" that understand the
importance of the Condorcet winner criterion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_winner_criterion, so Condorcet
advocates went through some tough times as those two organizations gained
traction. Thankfully, both organizations have gotten more careful about
their anti-Condorcet rhetoric, and both organizations have new leadership.
equal.vote is mildly pro Condorcet, but only mildly so, and maybe only
because they know I'll call them out if they get too overt marketing
against the Condorcet winner criterion. They endorse "Ranked Robin
https://electowiki.org/wiki/Ranked_Robin", which ... I won't get into
here.
As for Approval, my position hasn't really changed: it is able to pass
so many criteria by offloading the burden of voting onto the voter
himself and by classifying a large swath of different ballots as all
"honest" (in the rank-consistent sense). Not only strategic voters have
to play the strategy game, but honest voters too[1]: just determining
which honest vote to submit requires strategy! With ranking, on the
other hand, it's easy: there's only one rank-consistent honest ballot,
so if you don't want to play the game, just submit that ballot. No
manual DSV needed.
In the 1990s and 2000s (and perhaps even much of the 2010s), I would have
wholeheartedly endorsed this position. I've been persuaded that Approval
is fine. People understand "approval ratings" (or at least, they think
they do). When we had a close RCV election here in San Francisco (the
2018 mayoral special election
https://electowiki.org/wiki/2018_San_Francisco_mayoral_special_election),
the pre-election polls were useless. That bothered me a lot. I preferred
the winner, but it was really obvious that in a city where there were
parties competitive with the Democratic Party (who seemingly preferred the
winner of the 2018, since she was the "establishment" candidate), an RCV
election that was close as our 2018 election would have been a complete
fiasco.
We may want to make a point of figuring out a seemingly fair way of
seeding an arbitrary number of candidates in pairwise bracket, since there
are a lot of people that find those fun:
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/bracket-challenge/?contestid=32#brackets/fullbracket
(See also Forest's explanation of my point at
I hear you, and I read what Forest wrote. Ultimately, I think it's
important for most voters to vaguely know what the election is going to
look like in order to be comfortable using the system. I don't think most
folks here in the SF Bay Area really understand RCV. The topic frequently
comes up on the nightly news, for example here:
https://www.ktvu.com/news/lawsuit-filed-to-overturn-oakland-mayoral-election
My fear is that RCV makes fraud easier, because few people truly
understand what's going on under the hood, and the founders of FairVote
don't help educate; they obfuscate. I'm hopeful that FairVote will get
over their nasty case of "founder's syndrome" soon, so that they will
become better partners in electoral reform efforts.
[1] Both honest voters in the rank-consistent sense and in the von
Neumann-Morgenstern sense.
Could you explain what you mean by this?
Rob
Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
info
Experience suggests that natural, sincere, top-cycles are, & likely will
be, vanishingly rare.
Strategic top-cycles?
The wv Condorcet methods, such as RP(wv) & MinMax(wv), strongly deter
offensive strategy.
As I posted yesterday, that deterrence happens in two ways.
- They meet Minimal-Defense.
- Additionally, they’re strongly autodeterent.
If the CW’s preferrers refuse to rank anyone that they don’t like, then
burial to elect someone they don’t like will backfire.
But even without that defensive-truncation, burial is 10 times more likely
to backfire than succeed.
Burial, offensive-strategy won’t happen in wv Condorcet, because it’s
well-deterred, in both of the abo-described ways.
On Sun, Mar 17, 2024 at 23:36 Closed Limelike Curves <
closed.limelike.curves@gmail.com> wrote:
Only if there is a cycle involved. Either the election was in a cycle in
the first place or if the burial strategy is to push the election into a
cycle.If there never ever were any cycles, then Condorcet does not fail.
This is like saying that if there never were any odd numbers, 3 would be
an even number. If Condorcet cycles were mathematically impossible, that
would be great. Sadly, they aren't, so we have to deal with them.
For strategy, the mathematical possibility of a cycle--not its actual
occurrence in a set of results--is what matters, because threatening to
create a cycle is what forces a Condorcet winner's supporters to vote
strategically.
The system you're proposing--where we make cycles impossible--is Borda,
not Condorcet. Saari shows that if you delete every subset of ballots that
forms a cycle, then elect the Condorcet winner, you get Borda. If Condorcet
is "strategyproof unless cycles are involved," then Borda is always
strategy proof, because it's got none of them--but clearly it's not, and
the reason why is because what matters is whether you could,
hypothetically, have a cycle, not whether you actually do.
In reality, cycles are always involved. Sometimes it's a real cycle.
Sometimes it's a theoretical cycle that someone could create, and that
threat gives them leverage.
On Sun, Mar 17, 2024 at 1:06 PM robert bristow-johnson <
rbj@audioimagination.com> wrote:
On 03/16/2024 9:11 PM EDT Closed Limelike Curves <
closed.limelike.curves@gmail.com> wrote:
We don't wanna burden voters with any pressure to vote tactically, do
we? Why are people (equal.vote (http://equal.vote/), CES) promoting
methods that, whenever there are 3 or more candidates, inherently
forces voters to make tactical consideration of how they're going to vote
for their 2nd-favorite candidate?
Every method does this. With 3 candidates all Condorcet methods can
encourage burial.
Only if there is a cycle involved. Either the election was in a cycle in
the first place or if the burial strategy is to push the election into a
cycle.
If there never ever were any cycles, then Condorcet does not fail. No
spoiler, no incentive to vote other than sincerely. If you (the voter)
lose, it's because you're in the minority. If your hated candidate wins,
it's because no other candidate is favored by more voters than this hated
candidate.
BTW, I posted at r/EndFPTP a derived scenario that shows how STAR
fails to disincentivize tactical voting, even with the head-to-head runoff.
https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1bbq6hu/heres_a_good_hypothetical_for_how_star_fails/
I don't see how that's a failure. There's two possibilities here:
- If the votes are honest, I don't see what the problem is. The three
candidates are neck-and-neck and there's not much reason to prefer any.
The Center candidate is the Condorcet Winner and STAR only compares
relative rankings in the runoff. So like IRV, if the Condorcet Winner
gets into the final runoff, the Condorcet Winner will always beat anyone
else there.
The voters supporting Center but who liked Left better than Right would
have done better (like get their candidate elected) by burying Left. (But
at least 6 of them, had 4 of them buried Left, they would cause Right to
win.) So, by even by scoring Left at merely 1, they actually betrayed
their favorite candidate.
The voters supporting Right and who liked Center better than Left (this
would be normal) would have done better (like preventing Left from winning)
by scoring Center a little higher than they did. Had 2 or 3 or 6 of them
scored Center higher, enough for 6 points, then Left would be defeated.
But then they have to betray their favorite candidate and the promise of
STAR is that you don't have to do that. Now, what was hard for the Right
voters in Burlington to accept was that their candidate was never going to
win in any pairwise comparison and that their candidate was the spoiler.
But that was actually the case. Alaska was a little different. Peltola
was always in the lead and there was no "come from behind" victory as
occasionally happens with IRV.
- If the votes are strategic, this seems like terrible strategy on the
part of each group.
NO VOTER should have to strategize. But I explained that if your
preference is A>B>C, why without sophisticated consideration of the
possibilities it makes perfect sense to score your ballot A:5, B:1, C:0.
Makes simple sense, particularly with STAR (and assuming only 3 significant
candidates). The problem is when it's a close 3-way race, then, whether
it's STAR or IRV, then tactical voting might serve a voter's political
interests better than sincere voting. We should prevent that burden of
tactical voting whenever we can. (And we can with the ranked ballot as
long as there is always a Condorcet Winner.)
Why wouldn't you give the center candidate more than 0 stars?
I modeled this after real votes in Burlington 2009. There were 1289
Right voters (outa 3294) that bullet-voted for Right. There were even 568
Left voters (outa 2981) that bullet-voted for Left. That's what they did.
Now, unlike STAR, IRV would not have helped the Center voters with any
burying strategy. The problem with both STAR or IRV is with the Right
voters who were told that they can throw their full support behind Right
and not get burned by it. That was clearly not true in Burlington 2009 nor
in Alaska 2022 with IRV and I don't think STAR would have done better.
--
r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj@audioimagination.com
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
.
.
.
Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
info
As an example of a cycle inside a set of ballots where there is a Condorcet winner:
3: A>B>C2: B>C>A2: C>A>B2: B>A>C
A is the Condorcet winner (beating both others 5-4), so there's no cycle in that sense. But you can remove the following cycle within the ballots:
2: A>B>C2: B>C>A2: C>A>B
This leaves:
1: A>B>C2: B>A>C
B is now the Condorcet winner (and the Borda winner in the original set of ballots).
Toby
On Monday, 18 March 2024 at 06:42:46 GMT, Closed Limelike Curves closed.limelike.curves@gmail.com wrote:
Only if there is a cycle involved. Either the election was in a cycle in the first place or if the burial strategy is to push the election into a cycle.
If there never ever were any cycles, then Condorcet does not fail.
This is like saying that if there never were any odd numbers, 3 would be an even number. If Condorcet cycles were mathematically impossible, that would be great. Sadly, they aren't, so we have to deal with them.
For strategy, the mathematical possibility of a cycle--not its actual occurrence in a set of results--is what matters, because threatening to create a cycle is what forces a Condorcet winner's supporters to vote strategically.
The system you're proposing--where we make cycles impossible--is Borda, not Condorcet. Saari shows that if you delete every subset of ballots that forms a cycle, then elect the Condorcet winner, you get Borda. If Condorcet is "strategyproof unless cycles are involved," then Borda is always strategy proof, because it's got none of them--but clearly it's not, and the reason why is because what matters is whether you could, hypothetically, have a cycle, not whether you actually do.
In reality, cycles are always involved. Sometimes it's a real cycle. Sometimes it's a theoretical cycle that someone could create, and that threat gives them leverage.
I don't think Approval strategy is overly burdensome. As an honest voter, you just pick your least favourite candidate to approve, so one decision. Approval has advantages outside the usual criterion compliance as well. The results of an approval election are easily published and digested, as with a FPTP election. It's simply a list of votes (approvals) for each candidate. I think this is worth more than it gets credit for. In a Condorcet election, how would the result be published? Every head-to-head separately? Also in a debate versus FPTP, approval is the only method that has no real disadvantages relative to FPTP. FPTP proponents can always fall back on saying their method is simple, much simpler than the proposed alternatives. Well, approval is essentially the same level of simplicity. FPTP passes the rarely passed participation criterion, which approval also does. FPTP proponents don't really have anywhere to go, except to make the spurious claim that approval violates one person, one vote. But this is easily countered.
Toby
On Sunday, 17 March 2024 at 11:28:08 GMT, Kristofer Munsterhjelm km_elmet@t-online.de wrote:
As for Approval, my position hasn't really changed: it is able to pass
so many criteria by offloading the burden of voting onto the voter
himself and by classifying a large swath of different ballots as all
"honest" (in the rank-consistent sense). Not only strategic voters have
to play the strategy game, but honest voters too[1]: just determining
which honest vote to submit requires strategy! With ranking, on the
other hand, it's easy: there's only one rank-consistent honest ballot,
so if you don't want to play the game, just submit that ballot. No
manual DSV needed.
(See also Forest's explanation of my point at
http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2016-October/000717.html.)
-km
Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list info
On 03/18/2024 9:51 AM EDT Toby Pereira tdp201b@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
I don't think Approval strategy is overly burdensome. As an honest voter,
This is the same (bad) assumption that Borda made two centuries ago: "My system is only intended for honest men."
Bad assumption. We need the system to be more bullet-proof than that. Because we're not talking about impartial judges, these are partisan voters that want to promote their political interests by voting. They want their favorite candidate elected. At the same time, they want to prevent their least favorite candidate from getting elected.
When we test systems, we must use the "acid test". We must test them hard, with worst-case scenarios. To assume "honest voters" is throwing a soft ball at the system. We gotta throw hard balls and see how well the system behaves.
... you just pick your least favourite candidate to approve, so one decision.
Toby, do you mean "just pick your least favourite candidate to DISapprove, so one decision"?
A common syntactical mistake. Like the "Wicked Bible". Because if you meant "just pick your favourite candidate to approve, so one decision", that's of course, no different than FPTP.
Approval has advantages outside the usual criterion compliance as well. The results of an approval election are easily published and digested, as with a FPTP election. It's simply a list of votes (approvals) for each candidate. I think this is worth more than it gets credit for. In a Condorcet election, how would the result be published? Every head-to-head separately?
Yes. If C is the number of candidates (including Combined Write-In), then the number of pairs of candidates is C(C-1)/2. So C(C-1) tallies. If the method is Condorcet-Plurality (or for the legitimate interest of election observers), if we include the tallies of 1st-choice votes, then it's simply C² tallies. 5 candidates, that's 25 tallies. 10 or 12 centimeters of paper tape. Quite doable. For IRV, to make it summable it's 205 tallies, that would take about 3 meters of paper tape to print out. Not doable.
Also in a debate versus FPTP, approval is the only method that has no real disadvantages relative to FPTP. FPTP proponents can always fall back on saying their method is simple, much simpler than the proposed alternatives. Well, approval is essentially the same level of simplicity. FPTP passes the rarely passed participation criterion, which approval also does. FPTP proponents don't really have anywhere to go, except to make the spurious claim that approval violates one person, one vote. But this is easily countered.
No it's not. One reason I began my paper with an old (1911) ruling from the North Dakota Supreme Court striking down Bucklin Voting is because one of the concurring opinions had an important simple insight about government elections: We're counting people. Not marks on a ballot. The marks must simply correspond to people.
Just because the same rules apply to each voter equally does not mean that it satisfies One-Person-One-Vote, to count people equally. If, using whatever method you choose or scrutinize, if at the end of the day, M voters preferred Candidate A while N voters preferred Candidate B and Candidate B is elected even though M>N, then those fewer voters for B had cast votes that were somehow more effective than the greater number of voters that preferred A. A method that does not make that simple body count is not guaranteed to satisfy One-Person-One-Vote.
(And, of course, when there is a cycle, no method can satisfy it. But that does not excuse a method for failing to elect the Condorcet Winner when such exists.)
I am not a FPTP proponent. But this is not a spurious claim.
If I read you correctly above, then that voter has not been able to express a vote that differentiates their favorite candidate from their 2nd-choice candidate. Now for some voters, they might like both and they don't care which of those two candidates gets elected (just as long as one of them does).
But I find it very hard to believe that such a voter is the most common. Nearly every voter in every election that I had been aware of did actually have a favorite candidate. And if the Approval election turned out to be competitive between their favorite candidate and their 2nd-choice these voters that Approved both candidates are going to regret that they Approved their 2nd-choice if that candidate ends up beating their favorite candidate.
Essentially, for the voter that Approved both A and B (but preferred A to B) and finds out that B wins in a close election with A, they're going to think that their vote didn't count. And it didn't.
They have to be thinking about that as they wonder if they should fill in the oval on their 2nd choice.
But, of course, if they don't Approve their 2nd choice and the race turns out to be between their 2nd choice and the candidate they hate, and the latter candidate wins, they're going to regret not Approving their 2nd choice.
But in both cases these are tactical considerations that the voter has to make. With a ranked ballot we know what to do with our 2nd choice. We mark them #2.
--
r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj@audioimagination.com
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
.
.
.
On 03/18/2024 2:27 AM EDT Closed Limelike Curves closed.limelike.curves@gmail.com wrote:
Only if there is a cycle involved. Either the election was in a cycle in the first place or if the burial strategy is to push the election into a cycle.
If there never ever were any cycles, then Condorcet does not fail.
This is like saying that if there never were any odd numbers, 3 would be an even number.
No, there are about as many odd numbers as there are even numbers. Odd integers are common. Condorcet cycles are extremely uncommon. Circa 0.4%.
If Condorcet cycles were mathematically impossible, that would be great. Sadly, they aren't, so we have to deal with them.
I completely agree.
For strategy, the mathematical possibility of a cycle--not its actual occurrence in a set of results--is what matters, because threatening to create a cycle is what forces a Condorcet winner's supporters to vote strategically.
Well, actually, I think it's a loser in a Condorcet RCV election that would threaten to create a cycle. A good example is the Alaska 2022 special election. With Condorcet, Begich wins. If it were Plurality, Peltola wins.
Then if it were Condorcet-Plurality (or Bottom-Two Runoff, they both elect the same candidate in a 3 candidate race), if the Peltola campaign organized supporters to bullet-vote Peltola (not ranking Begich over Palin), they would have pushed the election into a cycle and then Peltola wins. But that can backfire, if Palin had a little more support, then this burial strategy could end up electing Palin.
The system you're proposing--where we make cycles impossible--
I never once said that. I said, if cycles never happened, Condorcet would never fail and there would be no reason for any voter to vote tactically. We know cycles can happen and we have to deal with it. But to fail to elect the Condorcet Winner when such candidate does exist, is inexcusable. There is no benefit in that at all.
is Borda, not Condorcet. Saari shows that if you delete every subset of ballots that forms a cycle, then elect the Condorcet winner, you get Borda. If Condorcet is "strategyproof unless cycles are involved," then Borda is always strategy proof, because it's got none of them--but clearly it's not, and the reason why is because what matters is whether you could, hypothetically, have a cycle, not whether you actually do.
If you have a Condorcet election that does not demonstrate a cycle, I'm sure there are examples where Borda would turn out differently.
In reality, cycles are always involved.
No. They're not always involved. Cycles are rare. But Arrow and Gibbard prevail, so cycles, even though they are rare, are unavoidable, so a ranked-ballot method has to be able to elect someone that
Sometimes it's a real cycle. Sometimes it's a theoretical cycle that someone could create, and that threat gives them leverage.
I know there are real cycles. In the U.S. 2 out of circa 500 RCV elections had no Condorcet Winner. These are Minneapolis Ward 2 city councilor in 2021 and Oakland School Board District 4 in 2022.
But they're rare.
--
r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj@audioimagination.com
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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I won't reply line by line, because it gets a bit complicated and fiddly. First of all, the bit about honest voters, where you interrupted me mid-sentence! I was replying to what Kristofer said about even an honest vote requiring strategy, and my point that it wasn't particularly complex. When I put "you just pick your least favourite candidate to approve", I meant you pick the candidate you are going to approve who is your least favourite of those who you are going to approve. You pick an approval cut-off and approve everyone above it. Sorry for any confusion. So it's just one decision - your approval cut-off point.
As for honest voting - I don't see this as similar to Borda. I think it would only be very rarely that someone would ever mis-order the candidates and approve a candidate they like less than a candidate they didn't approve. I'd say it's less likely than attempting some sort of burial in a ranked-ballot method (including Condorcet).
Regarding one-person-one-vote, I think your criticism there is just generally of approval as a method rather than about it failing one-person-one-vote. Someone might prefer a candidate over another but approve both or neither, thus losing the ability to distinguish between them, and this in some cases might prove pivotal to the election result. That this can happen is a valid criticism of approval voting, as this voter was unable to cast their one vote in the most effective way. But I don't think it's enough to say that approval fails one-person-one-vote.
In any case, I made that point relative to FPTP. In FPTP you can vote for the "wrong" candidate and not for your favourite of the two frontrunners, and so you can also lose the power of your vote in the same way. So a proponent of FPTP cannot point to any advantage of FPTP over approval in this respect.
Toby
On Monday, 18 March 2024 at 18:51:36 GMT, robert bristow-johnson rbj@audioimagination.com wrote:
On 03/18/2024 9:51 AM EDT Toby Pereira tdp201b@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
I don't think Approval strategy is overly burdensome. As an honest voter,
This is the same (bad) assumption that Borda made two centuries ago: "My system is only intended for honest men."
Bad assumption. We need the system to be more bullet-proof than that. Because we're not talking about impartial judges, these are partisan voters that want to promote their political interests by voting. They want their favorite candidate elected. At the same time, they want to prevent their least favorite candidate from getting elected.
When we test systems, we must use the "acid test". We must test them hard, with worst-case scenarios. To assume "honest voters" is throwing a soft ball at the system. We gotta throw hard balls and see how well the system behaves.
... you just pick your least favourite candidate to approve, so one decision.
Toby, do you mean "just pick your least favourite candidate to DISapprove, so one decision"?
A common syntactical mistake. Like the "Wicked Bible". Because if you meant "just pick your favourite candidate to approve, so one decision", that's of course, no different than FPTP.
Approval has advantages outside the usual criterion compliance as well. The results of an approval election are easily published and digested, as with a FPTP election. It's simply a list of votes (approvals) for each candidate. I think this is worth more than it gets credit for. In a Condorcet election, how would the result be published? Every head-to-head separately?
Yes. If C is the number of candidates (including Combined Write-In), then the number of pairs of candidates is C(C-1)/2. So C(C-1) tallies. If the method is Condorcet-Plurality (or for the legitimate interest of election observers), if we include the tallies of 1st-choice votes, then it's simply C² tallies. 5 candidates, that's 25 tallies. 10 or 12 centimeters of paper tape. Quite doable. For IRV, to make it summable it's 205 tallies, that would take about 3 meters of paper tape to print out. Not doable.
Also in a debate versus FPTP, approval is the only method that has no real disadvantages relative to FPTP. FPTP proponents can always fall back on saying their method is simple, much simpler than the proposed alternatives. Well, approval is essentially the same level of simplicity. FPTP passes the rarely passed participation criterion, which approval also does. FPTP proponents don't really have anywhere to go, except to make the spurious claim that approval violates one person, one vote. But this is easily countered.
No it's not. One reason I began my paper with an old (1911) ruling from the North Dakota Supreme Court striking down Bucklin Voting is because one of the concurring opinions had an important simple insight about government elections: We're counting people. Not marks on a ballot. The marks must simply correspond to people.
Just because the same rules apply to each voter equally does not mean that it satisfies One-Person-One-Vote, to count people equally. If, using whatever method you choose or scrutinize, if at the end of the day, M voters preferred Candidate A while N voters preferred Candidate B and Candidate B is elected even though M>N, then those fewer voters for B had cast votes that were somehow more effective than the greater number of voters that preferred A. A method that does not make that simple body count is not guaranteed to satisfy One-Person-One-Vote.
(And, of course, when there is a cycle, no method can satisfy it. But that does not excuse a method for failing to elect the Condorcet Winner when such exists.)
I am not a FPTP proponent. But this is not a spurious claim.
If I read you correctly above, then that voter has not been able to express a vote that differentiates their favorite candidate from their 2nd-choice candidate. Now for some voters, they might like both and they don't care which of those two candidates gets elected (just as long as one of them does).
But I find it very hard to believe that such a voter is the most common. Nearly every voter in every election that I had been aware of did actually have a favorite candidate. And if the Approval election turned out to be competitive between their favorite candidate and their 2nd-choice these voters that Approved both candidates are going to regret that they Approved their 2nd-choice if that candidate ends up beating their favorite candidate.
Essentially, for the voter that Approved both A and B (but preferred A to B) and finds out that B wins in a close election with A, they're going to think that their vote didn't count. And it didn't.
They have to be thinking about that as they wonder if they should fill in the oval on their 2nd choice.
But, of course, if they don't Approve their 2nd choice and the race turns out to be between their 2nd choice and the candidate they hate, and the latter candidate wins, they're going to regret not Approving their 2nd choice.
But in both cases these are tactical considerations that the voter has to make. With a ranked ballot we know what to do with our 2nd choice. We mark them #2.
--
r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj@audioimagination.com
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list info
On 2024-03-18 02:03, Rob Lanphier wrote:
Hi Kristofer,
I have a detailed reply below. In short, I'm still pretty sure Michael
Ossipoff is worth listening to every so often (even though many of his
emails are thoughtless stream-of-consciousness that would get him banned
in most places, and I haven't ruled that out if it becomes clear he's
driving people away).
That may be, but I feel he's rather too irascible to deal with, and that
he gets his partisan preferences in the way of discussing methods.
(Other readers, feel free to skip to "voting method stuff below".)
Here's from the discussion that ultimately led to the plonkage:
On 2023-09-21, Mike argued in favor of IRV by (as I understood it)
essentially saying that, given that IRV has compromising failure, any
electorate that knew this and still went for IRV were tough enough not
to compromise to begin with. The reasoning went that, as they know of
IRV's compromising failure, they wouldn't choose a method that had
compromising failure unless they were determined to avoid triggering
that failure. Quoting:
So I’m sure that I’ll propose & recommend good Condorcet versions
(even if I don’t yet know which ones & how many) over IRV.
…but I’ll nonetheless include IRV among the methods that I offer,
because it’s better than a lot of people believe. …though its merit &
workability strongly depend on the electorate & the candidate-lineup.
I.e. Because it isn’t Condorcet-complying, it’s necessary that the
electorate aren’t timid lesser-evil giveaway voters.
But an electorate that has just enacted IRV in a referendum didn’t
do so because they want to rank Lesser-Evil over their favorite. They
enacted it because they want to rank sincerely, to express & fully help
their favorite.
Emphasis on the last sentence. Source
http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2023-September/004912.html.
At the time I found this very strange, and it seemed to me that using
such reasoning could lead to absurdity.
Then, on the 25th., he said that Coombs had too much of a burial
incentive to be useful.
Some academic authors have high praise for Coombs. One say that, with
sincere ranking, & fewer than 5 candidates, Coombs always elects the CW.
But Coombs is obviously vulnerable to east burial strategy. In particular,
trust & betrayal perpetrated by the voters of a “ lesser”-evil.
Sure, after that betrayal, they’d hopefully never have any support from
their victims again.
But 1) Again we’re talking about resolution at least an election-cycle
later; & 2) It could devolve to never-ending routine mutual burial.
Coombs doesn’t sound very promising to me.
Source:
http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2023-September/004941.html
So I thought I would respond by poking a bit of fun at it, and
indirectly show how the IRV reasoning proved too much and could lead to
absurdity:
But Coombs is obviously vulnerable to east burial strategy. In
particular, trust & betrayal perpetrated by the voters of a “ lesser”-evil.
Clearly then, knowing this fact, the voters who propose and enact Coombs
must be tough voters who would never ever bury. Therefore Coombs' burial
incentive is no problem wherever it would be proposed.
I jest :-)
Apparently he got quite offended. He responded:
I jest :-)
…
…&, by so doing, you waste our time, & space at the postings-page, & send
your substandard attempt at humor to everyone’s e-mail.
…
You’re aware that your bullshit is going to the e-mail of every
list-subscriber, right?
and
The only absurdity is in his sloppy attempt at an analogy, which has
nothing in common with what it’s supposed to be an analogy for. …& his
equally sloppy & absurd conclusion from it (which he expressed as a serious
“real point”, rather than as “jest”);
I enjoy these sorts of replies about as much as the next guy, which is
to say not at all, so that was that. Now, he did say in his post that
Perhaps Kristofer didn’t read my posts that said that RCV’s
disadvantage is that it strongly depends on the electorate not being timid
lesser-evil giveaway-voters.
which suggests that his point was not so much "electorates who propose
IRV must necessarily have precommitted themselves to not do
compromising" as "IRV will fail if the electorate hasn't". But if so,
there are definitely better ways to to say "I think your joke is off the
mark, you must have misunderstood".
I usually don't poke fun to press the absurdity of a point, so I think
he had already got under my skin at that point. All the more reason to
stay away.
Anyway,
=== voting method stuff below ===
Credible voter models show that approval voting
and Condorcet consistency are practically compatible, even if they
aren't strictly compatible. A system that "computers can count, even if
people can't" is not viable in our lifetimes, because people are more
complicated than computers.
The example I like to use here is Meek in New Zealand local elections.
Meek's method uses a fixed point iteration to determine the keep values,
and thus necessarily has to be counted by computer. I doubt you could go
to an average New Zealand voter and get them to explain how Meek works.
Yet they use it, so it's possible for the voters to trust a method with
computerized counting.
And I suppose that's the point: trust. It's harder to trust a
computerized system when it hasn't built up a reputation for good
results, or when previous complicated systems have failed (if IRV is to
be considered both a complicated system and one that failed).
Another example would be the Huntington-Hill apportionment method. It's
not just complex but needlessly so (Webster would be better). I suspect
the average voter would be hard pressed to explain how it works. Over
here in Norway we also have a greedy algorithm that handles top-up
leveling seats to improve national proportionality while also
maintaining regional proportionality. Again, I doubt that an average
voter could explain how it works; but they mostly trust it, so there's
little problem. (Bizarre outcomes notwithstanding: personally I'd favor
a change of algorithm, but that's another matter.)
I agree that Approval wins by a mile in the bang for the buck category.
If your summability is restricted to one number per candidate,
Approval/Range is the best you can get, but mostly because the other
contenders make it no contest. But I can't shake the "manual DSV" and
rb-j objections, that plain honest voters will be annoyed that they have
to collapse their expressions into "yay? or boo?", and that the small
risk of disastrous returns from misjudged strategy will eventually blow up.
Admittedly, I have no proof of this, since Approval hasn't been used
much. I just know that's how I would think if my area switched to
Approval. (We don't actually have single-winner elections, but you get
my point :-)
I've got Mike plonked, so I don't see his posts,
That's too bad. Michael is frequently annoying, but he's frequently
correct. This mailing list was started in large part because of a
mailing-list conversation I had with Michael in 1995, where he was being
obnoxious on another list. I thought I'd be able to show that he was a
crank. Turns out he taught me about center squeeze. You should
consider unplonking him.
There are definitely things I disagree with him about, and that I would
tell him were he, say, Forest. But I don't fancy getting my head bitten
off again. Maybe I will, but I'm not sure yet.
but I would like to add this:
- If a lack of summability is not a problem, then BTR-IRV isn't that
much more complex than IRV. And at the cost of slightly more complexity
than that, Benham can preserve IRV's strategy resistance and do away
with most of its exit incentive.
Having volunteered as a poll worker for the first time in a city that
uses RCV for some elections, it changed my perspective on election
security. I appreciated how much process there was, but also how much
of the process was shrugged off when it was a little inconvenient.
There weren't any RCV races in the March 5 election here, so I didn't
have to perform any tech support for RCV, but having voted in many RCV
races, I could see what a goat rodeo that can become for poll workers.
My hunch is that the more complicated the election, the easier it would
be to have steps of the process shrugged off as poll workers get
frazzled as the day wears on.
I think "summability" is really just shorthand for "vaguely makes sense
for someone who really really cares about the end result to keep track
of the election in real time". Strict Condorcet methods are admittedly
difficult on this count. Approval is drop-dead simple on this count.
That's more or less what I've come to think too. Summability primarily
is about interpretability, and secondarily that people transporting the
data have a chance to see if it's been tampered with. In both cases it's
related to transparency.
Computer wise, it's possible to store full rankings for a worldwide
election and a reasonable number of candidates on an SD card, even with
100% turnout of 8.1 billion voters. So summability is not for storage
purposes alone, unless you're doing a manual count (which again ties
into transparency).
The interpretability point is weakened as you go from first order to
second to third... and by the time you're doing real-time IRV sankey
diagrams, all meaning is lost.
If computers do the counting, then relatively laborious steps aren't
any problem, as long as the public understands why they're there.
I think that's an easy thing for those of us who are good with computers
to say. Computers are taking over the world, but there's a limit to how
much people trust computers and the people who write the software for
computers. Many people "trust" computers only as far as they can throw
a datacenter. Granted, it's possible to wire up many computers in a
small box that most healthy adults can throw and call that a
"datacenter", but I'm talking about the brick-and-mortar datacenters
often placed near power generation plants. Most people have given up
the fight, and welcome our robot overlords, but our robot overlords
don't really care if we understand elections, and may prefer to do away
with elections and take control themselves. :-)
I'm definitely not going to propose that large language models call
elections :-)
In seriousness, I'm guessing this mailing list skews heavily "math
literate" in addition to skewing heavily "computer literate", and I
think that those of us that are literate in those way have a hard time
relating to people that aren't as literate in those areas:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/math-hard-easy-teaching-instruction/2021/06/25/4fbec7ac-d46b-11eb-ae54-515e2f63d37d_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/math-hard-easy-teaching-instruction/2021/06/25/4fbec7ac-d46b-11eb-ae54-515e2f63d37d_story.html
And that's a good point: the curse of knowledge is very real.
BTR-IRV's
safeguarding step follows directly from your concept that "if more
people prefer A to B than vice versa, then B must not be elected".
- If, on the other hand, lack of summability *is* a problem, then that
disqualifies IRV outright and we're done.
I'm supportive of BTR-IRV, but I'll concede that summability and
reporting results in an easy-to-understand form (in real time) is a big
problem. I think it's important for voters (on election night) to be
able to see a television reporter say "Results from the precincts on the
southwest side of town were just reported, and CandB took the lead over
CandA. Let's turn it over to our analysts at the elections desk to
explain what happened!" The pre-election polling and exit polling
should provide a reasonably understandable explanation. I fear we're
due for a lot of election fraud if most people don't understand what
happened (and honestly, having lived in San Francisco since 2011 and
seen how some close elections have turned out, it wouldn't surprise me
at all if there's some consequential electoral fraud here).
I'm no fan of IRV either. I'm just saying "if IRV, then Condorcet-IRV".
That is, the return on including some Condorcet provision if you're
going to do IRV anyway is high enough that you really ought to do it.
As far as reporting goes: does anyone here know how Australia does it?
I suppose their above-the-line voting makes IRV much more like largest
remainders party list, but I've heard that optional voting is becoming
more common, which could lead more voters to manually rank the candidates.
I also have the impression that polls include pairwise data
("two-party-preferred") showing the relative support between the two
party blocs (Labour and LibNat). But I don't want to mess up the
details, so I'll leave them to someone who actually lives in Australia.
French presidential polls seem to include hypothetical expected pairwise
results between the candidates who have some chance of getting into the
final. See
https://www.politico.eu/article/5-charts-to-help-you-read-the-french-presidential-election/,
figure near the bottom. So if we look more broadly, pairwise reporting
isn't completely unheard of.
I hear you, and I read what Forest wrote. Ultimately, I think it's
important for most voters to vaguely know what the election is going to
look like in order to be comfortable using the system. I don't think
most folks here in the SF Bay Area really understand RCV. The topic
frequently comes up on the nightly news, for example here:
https://www.ktvu.com/news/lawsuit-filed-to-overturn-oakland-mayoral-election https://www.ktvu.com/news/lawsuit-filed-to-overturn-oakland-mayoral-election
My fear is that RCV makes fraud easier, because few people truly
understand what's going on under the hood, and the founders of FairVote
don't help educate; they obfuscate. I'm hopeful that FairVote will get
over their nasty case of "founder's syndrome" soon, so that they will
become better partners in electoral reform efforts.
IRV RCV is entirely nonsummable. (Summable) Condorcet should do better,
particularly in the absence of cycles. One could possibly do reporting
by saying something like "candidate X is still the champ, but his match
against candidate Y is evening out - what does that mean, is this region
a stronghold of Y's? Did the voters here prefer Y to X because of
economic reasons?", etc.
When things get cyclical it gets a lot tougher. But simple rules could
possibly still work, e.g. minmax as "your strength is the strength of
the most unfavorable matchup". Reporting could talk about how X's
apparent comfortable margin is taking a beating on some issue that
candidates Y and Z are strong at, and that X's victory is looking slim
because Y is already doing a good job in the X vs Y contest. Who the
current champ is and how his winning chances are either being shored up
or eroded by more votes coming in.
Copeland is probably quite easy to understand although indecisive and
not cloneproof. Brackets could be simple, but I don't know of any
Condorcet method that uses them -- and the seed order would have to be
set in advance. Otherwise, as more votes come in, it could alter the
seed order and make the comparisons seem like an unpredictable mess.
[1] Both honest voters in the rank-consistent sense and in the von
Neumann-Morgenstern sense.
Could you explain what you mean by this?
What I mean is that both honest voters who have a particular rating in
mind, but not a ranking; and honest voters who have strengths of
preference in mind, have multiple honest ballots to choose between. So
the choice of which one to use becomes a matter of what others are
doing, even for people who would rather not do strategy.
This is most obvious for ranked voters: if your opinion is A>B>C, you
don't know if you should approve only A or both A and B.
von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities is a way to quantify strength of
preference by using lotteries and expected utility.
Suppose that your preference is A>B>C, and that you think that getting B
for sure is as good as a gamble with a 40% chance of A, and a 60% of C.
Then your von Neumann-Morgenstern utility for B is 40% of the one for A
plus 60% of the one for C. E.g. if your rating of C is zero and A is 10,
then B is 4.
By considering what gamble you would find about as good as getting a
candidate for sure, you can (theoretically) determine your strength of
preference for all other candidates once you have two of them. So that
allows a more meaningful theory about what strength of preference really
is, and to say that a ballot is honest if it's consistent with these
preference strengths.
But there's still a problem: you're left with two free variables - the
ratings of your favorite and least favorite. So there are still multiple
honest Range ballots. And if we suppose that Approval works by approving
every candidate above the halfway point on the rating scale, then there
are still multiple honest Approval ballots, too.
We could get around this by fixing the voter's favorite candidate to a
rating of 100% and the voter's least favorite to 0%. Now there is only
one honest rated-like ballot. But methods that automatically normalize
like this fail IIA, and both in Range and (above mean utility) Approval,
there can exist an incentive to not cast that honest ballot.
(In practice, people don't like risk and so prefer a sure deal over a
gamble, but there are ways to compensate for this too. The point is
that it provides a formalization of the idea of "strength of preference".)
-km
On 2024-03-18 07:45, Closed Limelike Curves wrote:
VNM-sense means roughly that a 50 is just as good as a 50% chance of a 0
or 100.
VNM is great--if you put it together with the Dutch Book theorems, it
basically gets you to "score voting is the objectively correct voting
system" ;-)
(Except sadly not if you have strategic voters.)
FWIW, I think the dutch book argument is overrated because it assumes
ceteris paribus :-) That once you've gonne enough trips around the
cycle, someone won't wisen up and say "no".
It's true, though, that things would be much easier if we had an
unforgeable signal of people's utility. Or just interpersonal utility
comparison at every scale, even if people could lie.
-km