He's probably on this mailing list and is reading this right now.

from https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/qa1f2i/why_do_people_say_approval_voting_is_immune_to/hhgmvqn/?context=3

What's all this Utilitarian zeal about with these Approval/Cardinal advocates?

--

r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj@audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

.
.
.

Why does their identity matter?  Discuss the facts, not ad hominems.

Also, I'm surprised and a bit saddened that you haven't come around to
cardinal systems yet.  :/

The goal of democracy is to elect the candidate who best represents the
will of the voters.  My near-indifference between two candidates shouldn't
arbitrarily be given the same weight as your strong preference between them.

On Sun, Oct 24, 2021 at 7:12 PM robert bristow-johnson wrote:

I don't know who the person is. As someone else just pointed out, the
person's identity is not the issue.

Regarding the issues ...

On Reddit I saw the reference to the "Tactical Voting Basics" article
and skimmed it.  That was some days ago so I skimmed parts of it again.

It contains some odd claims.

It refers to a webpage written by Warren Smith that I've seen before,
and that webpage is flawed, so of course the claim that Condorcet
methods are vulnerable to tactical voting is flawed. Specifically there
is a lack meaningful evidence based on clear reasoning.

The fact that the article begins by referring to random ballots is a big
clue that the person does not understand tactical voting in the way that
most people use the term.

Sigh, I see misleading information on all three websites: Election
Science, STAR/Equal Vote, and FairVote.

I do not support Robert's use of inappropriate language. But I do agree
there is lots of propaganda being presented on Reddit that is not backed
up by a clear understanding of the "basics" of election-method reform.
And I do see that lots of it is coming from fans of "cardinal" voting
methods. Yet I don't see that support clearly expressed here on this forum.

Richard Fobes
The VoteFair guy

On 10/24/2021 4:12 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:

Hi Richard,

Thanks for highlighting this thread (and changing the subject line).
I want to reply to your last paragraph:

On Sun, Oct 24, 2021 at 5:51 PM Richard, the VoteFair guy
electionmethods@votefair.org wrote:

I agree with you.  Verbally, I'm more than willing to use all of
George Carlin's "seven dirty words"
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_dirty_words in ample quantity,
and I have a difficult time NOT using many of those words after I've
had enough alcohol.  I spent much of my early childhood listening to
George Carlin and hanging around auto mechanics who had NO PROBLEM
dropping any and all of those words around a six-year-old.  However,
if I were giving a talk to a political organization (e.g. the League
of Women Voters), I would refrain.  Even if I was friends with every
single person in the audience, I would avoid dropping the f-bomb,
because it's rare that foul language is politically persuasive.

When addressing this mailing list, I'd like everyone here to imagine
that they are writing words to be spoken at the podium pictured in
this event:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/297800594094453503/

Pretend you're the speaker after the person at the podium, addressing
the same audience.  In fact, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if
someone from that audience is reading this mailing list.  Let's all
use this mailing list as a way to practice not being a foul-mouthed
douchebag, okay?  :-)

I suspect that the consensus among frequent posters on this mailing
list is that the Condorcet Winner criterion is more important than
many of the things that die hard fans of "cardinal" methods insist
upon (like poorly-modeled notions of "utility"). Moreover, I suspect
that the /r/EndFPTP subreddit has greater readership than this mailing
list.  That's why before I wrote the email you are reading now, I
responded to /u/rb-j over on reddit (supporting his well-written
comment about justice over utility):
https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/qa1f2i/why_do_people_say_approval_voting_is_immune_to/hhy797b/?context=10000

I've appreciated that I can be proud of the 25+ years of archived
discussion of this mailing list:
https://electowiki.org/wiki/EM-list

There is a lot of great information in this archive.  The
"signal-to-noise" ratio has historically been very good.  Let's all
work to make sure that any email that any of us sends to this mailing
list is clear, concise and clean enough such that any of us would
cheerfully print out the unredacted email and physically mail it to
our respective representatives, without being embarrassed about
anything that was written.  And let's do that with our reddit comments
too.  Let us all use all of our online communication to win in the
court of public opinion.

Rob
p.s. at some point, I need to finish up writing a revised "Code of
Conduct" for this mailing list, using the "Bill of Responsibilities"
idea that I cooked up a while ago:
(https://robla.miraheze.org/wiki/Bill_of_Responsibilities).  To
everyone reading this mailing list: feel free to periodically pester
me about my progress on that.

Hi,

You wrote to Robert:

Le dimanche 24 octobre 2021, 19:35:47 UTC−5, fdpk69p6uq@snkmail.com fdpk69p6uq@snkmail.com a écrit :

It sounds reasonable. There is probably less dispute about the goal of methods, than the
technique to achieve it.

Personally I have no objection to ratings ballots, I just don't often see what we can do
with them that will achieve something additional. Something like JGA'S Cardinal-Weighted
Pairwise or Approval-Weighted Pairwise are fine by me, giving voters a way to allocate
preference strength as they see necessary.

I tend to assume elections are hard-fought with probably few strong frontrunners. In that
environment I'm not sure what combination of method and scenario would both highlight the
concern that you raise and also suggest a solution.

Kevin

On 10/25/21 2:35 AM, fdpk69p6uq@snkmail.com wrote:

Let me make a ranked voting advocate (ordinalist?) argument here. I'll
be referring to "simple cardinal methods", by which I mean things like
Range, and not so much things that I'm fumbling towards in my utility posts.

Cardinal supporters tend to use two arguments to argue for the
superiority of cardinal methods over ordinal ones.

The first is that cardinal methods support strength of preference; and
the second is that, because they pass FBC (and IIA), they inherently are
more robust to strategy.

My response to these are, much abbreviated, that first, the "strength of
preference" that these methods gather is probably ambiguous, and if it
weren't, it would come with significant disadvantages.

And second, that the methods' IIA and FBC compliance take a form that
shoves what used to be tactical voting into a mush that's kind of
honest, kind of not; and that once that's made clear, it's obvious that
the methods no longer achieve the impossible. But because it doesn't
look like ranked voting strategy, cardinal advocates can shift between a
position that the methods permit everybody to vote "honestly" (an easy
position) and that the methods are strategy-proof (a hard, incorrect
position).

So for the first point, let's use Range as the standard cardinal method.
Range asks for a set of ratings that are intended to represent utility,
so that your rating is proportional to the utility you achieve from
seeing this candidate elected. That's what's being demonstrated in
examples like the pizza election: that the meat eaters show that their
utility from getting mushroom pizza is not that far off from the utility
of getting pepperoni, so that the method elects the pizza that satisfies
all.

But here's a problem. I can't know that my scale is calibrated the same
way as yours. In philosophy, this is known as the problem of
incommensurability. Suppose I happen to feel more pleasure (and pain)
than you, but due to growing up in the same society as you, I mistakenly
appear to use the same scale as you. It's then quite hard to know that
when I say 6/10 I mean what you would consider twice as good as that.

At first it would seem, though, that Range has dodged a bullet. Because
if utility were directly comparable on an absolute scale, then there
might exist "pleasure wizards"[1] who obtain so much utility from a
choice that they effectively become dictators. By insisting on a 0-1
scale (in its continuous version), Range limits the power any one voter
has and so enforces a weak type of one man, one vote. It is what I
called a type three method - voters might voluntarily decide to forego
some of their power to make the outcome better for others (again, as in
the pizza election).

But the problem with this is that Range supposes that there's a common
scale where there isn't. As a consequence, the concept of just what is a
honest vote becomes blurred. E.g. suppose that I consider the sure
election of Y to be equally good as a 50-50 shot of either X or Z
winning. Do I rate X 1, Y 0.5, and Z 0? Or do I rate X 0.5, Y 0.25, and
Z 0? Because there's no way to answer that question (unless it somehow
becomes possible to get at utility information), there's more than one
honest vote, and a honest voter is faced with the burden of having to
decide which one. (It is assumed that voters will answer the question
by normalizing[2], but this leads to strategy problems which I'll get to.)

My attempts to generalize STAR came from asking "what if we want to be
truly honest about what information it makes sense to ask of voters,
while respecting OMOV?". Well, we could ask the voters about preferences
over lotteries (as the 50-50 vs certainty example above). Doing so, the
method acknowledges the ambiguity of comparing utility. Perhaps there's
more we can do - e.g. by following MJ's reasoning of a common standard,
or by separating "worse than nothing happening" events from "better than
nothing happening" ones.

But all of this is better than just saying "it means what you want it to
mean", and then sweeping the resulting ambiguity in honest voters under
the carpet.

As for the point that e.g. Range is superior to ordinal methods because
Range passes IIA and the ordinal ones don't, I always feel like that's a
bit of a sleight of hand. To explain, let's divide the ballot types into
three:

1. The highest information honest ballot (ranking candidates in order of
   preference, reporting relative utility values in Range).

2. Other honest ballots: some monotone transformation of this.

3. Tactical/dishonest ballots (order reversal).

Ranked methods have a very obvious category one, and going for some
category two ballot instead (e.g. equal rank or truncation) doesn't
usually produce much harm. Cardinal methods like Range replaces most of
category three with category two because they pass FBC and IIA.

As I've argued above, there's not really a category one for Range
because it asks for more than the voter can provide. And we know from
Gibbard's theorem that no deterministic voting method (cardinal or
ordinal) is entirely free of strategy. So both categories one and three
collapse into category two in Range: the former because there's no one
honest ballot, and the latter because order-reversal isn't necessary
(the famous FBC compliance, but it's actually stronger than just FBC).

So, in ranked voting methods, voting strategy consists of choosing an
appropriate category three ballot. In methods like Range, it consists of
choosing an appropriate category two ballot.

But here's the problem: having a clearly defined category one and a
narrow category two means that a voter who values honesty as such can
just choose the one honest ballot and then go home without regrets. But
in Range, because "every ballot is honest", he has to carefully
deliberate which honest vote to choose. And if he chooses wrong (e.g.
in a Burr dilemma), he'll sure come to regret it.

That kind of peril should only exist, IMHO, for voters who decide to
play rough by choosing a category three ballot.

And thus the sleight of hand: in a ranked method, "honest" means more or
less category one[3]. So cardinal voting proponents can say "oh, but our
category three is empty because of FBC!", but all they're really doing
is shifting the Gibbard-mandated instrumental voting from category three
over to category two. This lets them say "you can just vote honestly",
thus giving the impression there's no risk in Range. But it's actually
the other way around: it's not only determined strategic voters who may
regret the strategy they chose, but also honest voters who just want to
vote honestly and go home.

This also poisons the value of IIA. If IIA is to be practically
meaningful, it must mean that the outcome doesn't change when a
candidate who didn't win drops out. But if every voter is deliberating
which type-two ballot to go for, the ballots may change even if the
sentiment doesn't.

In other words: if enough voters normalize in Approval, then Approval's
IIA compliance isn't worth much at all in practice. E.g. first round
ballots:

25: A>B>>C
40: B>C>>A
35: C>A>>B

The Approval winner is C.

But now let A drop out, and the voters renormalize (as Warren suggests
everybody would):

25: B>>C
40: B>>C
35: C>>B

and then B wins, so even though Approval passes IIA de jure, it looks
rather different de facto. Telling the voters to perform a particular
algorithm on their ballots before submitting them, and then claiming the
inputs to the method satisfies IIA, doesn't mean the method plus the
manual algorithm passes IIA!

So the problem, in summing up, is that there's too much vagueness to
hide subtleties in. Cardinal methods measure utility (but they don't, so
what do they measure?). Cardinal methods let you vote honestly (but
honest doesn't mean the same thing anymore). Cardinal methods pass IIA
and FBC (but it does them much less good than ranked methods). Bayesian
regret evaluations show Range as superior to ranked methods (but
questionable assumptions about voter strategy may invalidate the results).

It's better to be honest about the limitations that exist. If we can
only get lottery information, then the method should reflect that. If we
can get more, then the method should show how we can get it. That way,
there won't be anything up its sleeve.

-km

[1]
https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195189254.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780195189254-e-020
or, if you're more in a funny mood,
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-04-03 :-)

[2] E.g. Warren Smith says voters will do so because they're not
"strategic idiots", and that voters who don't normalize in a
two-candidate election are simply "idiots".
http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2006-December/084357.html
and
http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2007-January/084662.html
respectively.

[3] There's a caveat here because equal-rank/truncation seem to be in
category two, and so a response to this reasoning would be "ranked
ballots have category two too!". But there's very little regret in
choosing category one instead of two, in practice. However, some ranked
methods that pass FBC do so by making equal-rank stronger than strict
ranking, and those reintroduce the problem.

I prefer Ted Stern's version of Approval Sorted Margins over any other
single-winner public proposal I've seen lately, other than simple asset
voting as proposed by Charles Dodgson in the 19th century, and more
recently a symmetrical version of Majority Judgment currently in the works
if it can be simplified adequately w/o sacrificing its integrity.

Ted's version of ASM uses a version of what we used to call "3-slot
approval" to seed the  finish order which is then sorted pairwise with
pairs that show the least discrepancy in their 3-slot scores getting
priority for pairwise rectification. It is important to note that the
ordinal information is inferred from six slots, twice as many as those used
for the cardinal seeding.

This is valuable for several (including psychological) reasons. One is that
3-slots are not enough for the ordinal information to fully distinguish the
pairwise preferences important to the voters. But increasing the score
slots (as in STAR) is not the answer, for several reasons ... STAR voters
aware of optimal approval strategy (vote only at the extremes) would feel
too much tension between the need to make use of the intermediate score
levels for ordinal information and the need to avoid those levels for
optimal cardinal strategy.

But for non-perfect information elections, even sophisticated approval
voters might welcome a middle slot.

I like three slots because, personally I would reserve the top and bottom
slots for definite approvals and disapproval, respectively.  [Bottom also
takes care of blank or no opinion to obviate darkhorse candidates].

How do you know if you "definitely" approve or disapprove of a candidate?

Easy ...  if you don't know that you do, then you don't. If you are not
sure, or if you have to ask, then your approval or disapproval is
definitely not definite.

So it's easy to know how to vote honestly under that rule, which should be
part of the instructions to the voters.

People who think they can out wit the devil may be tempted to vote
dishonestly, but at least they have the option of voting honestly if those
"definite instructions" are the official instructions.

So Ted Stern's version of ASM is one of the best possible public proposals
IMHO.

However personally, I would rather have it implemented in the format of a
Ranked Ranking ballot, so that the voter has more freedom in defining the
cutoffs demarcating the three slots, and making more ordinal distinctions
within the three approval levels if needed to distinguish among clones in a
large election:

A>B1>B2>C>>U>V>W1>W2>W3>>X>Y>Z...

BORDA is quoted as saying that his method was only intended for "honest
men." But honestly would not fix the greater design flaw ... clone
dependence ... in particular, clone loser.  Cardinal Ratings is a partial
solution ... with all of the caveats expressed in Kristofer's reservations.

A solution nearer to the spirit of Borda would be a point system based on
Ranked Rankings.

Borda can be thought of as a way of converting rankings into a score/point
system ... sacrificing clone dependence.

A minimal tweak of Borda (to restore clone independence) would be to base a
point system on Ranked Rankings ... with weaker rankings reflected in
smaller point/score gaps.

This idea is not my favorite way of using Ranked Rankings ... but it may
help some people to see the value of a different kind of ordinal ballot ...
more expressive than ordinary rankings without the strategic and
psychological burden (including cognitive dissonance) of the (obviously
exaggerated) implied numerical precision of ratings.

El mar., 26 de oct. de 2021 8:26 a. m., Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
km_elmet@t-online.de> escribió:

Hi Forest,

I've been thinking about the modified version of ASM. I think it should be
called Preferred-Acceptable-Insufficient-Reject Sorted Margins, or
PAIR-SM. I don't like movable demarcations, and I think more than 3 levels
within each category would be excessive, so I would go with 10 total levels
(score 0 to 9, rank inferred from rating): scores 9, 8, 7 are Preferred,
scores 6, 5, 4 are Acceptable, scores 3, 2, 1 are Insufficient (formerly
"compromise": the voter finds candidates at this level distasteful, but
better than the alternative) and score 0 is reject.

Preferred ratings get 10 points, Acceptable ratings get 5 points,
Insufficient candidates get 0 points but have pairwise votes over lower
rated Insufficient candidates and all Rejected candidates. Then Sorted
margins is run using those points.

PAIR-SM could also be run with only 2 levels within each of the approved
categories, for a total of 7 levels, if you want to retain an odd number of
ratings.

The one problem I've had on the EndFPTP subreddit is explaining how the
ranking is more important than approval. While the Approval level is in
fact what sets up the seed ordering, it is practically irrelevant unless
there is a Condorcet cycle. It's a little hard to explain that the Approval
rating is more of an insurance that it won't be needed.

On Wed, Oct 27, 2021 at 6:31 PM Forest Simmons forest.simmons21@gmail.com
wrote: