Re: [EM] Did anyone pay attention to what he said about Approval vs Condorcet?
On 05/29/2024 11:00 PM EDT Michael Ossipoff email9648742@gmail.com wrote:
Just one more astronomical reference:
Next time you look at the Milky-Way, or a long-exposure photo of it or any galaxy:
Realize that, for every one of its estimated half-trillion stars, there are 12 instances of having to find a candidate-name in a ranking of 135 candidate-names, when doing a handcount of Condorcet with 135 candidates (the number that a recent California governor-election had), & 300 million voters.
Only 135? That's nothin'. We should have a couple thousand candidates for governor on the ballot. Why not?
BTW, when I posted my reply to one of KM’s last posts before he temmporarily left this list, I worded it as a reply to him, even though I’d removed his name from the post’s “To:” field, as he’d requested.
In that reply, I often said that I didn’t know what he meant. In philosophy it isn’t unusual for what one person says to be completely meaningless to someone else.
That doesn’t mean that one of those people is wrong. It’s just that one person’s philosophical framework & topic isn’t the other person’s.
KM’s philosophy of voting systems, & the philosophical framework in which he was discussing them can rightly, validly & reasonably influence KM’s preferences & choices among voting-systems.
But it doesn’t apply to the objective matter-of-fact Approval-properties that I’d stated.
I dunno, different countries and different states do different things. But where I am from, the state has actual ballot access requirements. A certain number of signatures. I think the legislature had someone do research on some probabilistic correlation of how many signatures required and how many candidates make it onto the ballot. How much they settled on, I don't know but there are usually 4 or 5 candidates on the November ballot for Governor of Vermont.
Now for IRV, 5 candidates is 205 tallies. For Condorcet-Plurality or Condorcet-TTR, it's 25 tallies.
For 4 candidates it's 40 for IRV and 16 for Condorcet-Plurality.
But you heard of "The Paradox of Choice"? We don't want just two candidates, we want more choices than that. But we don't want 135 candidates either on even an electronic ballot. (And I will never give up on paper ballots and optical-scan technology, so I want all these races to fit on a single ballot, front and back.)
We just don't want more than the 4 or 5 most credible candidates. The way you get sufficient credibility to be on the ballot is to get lots of valid signatures on a petition. The number of signatures needed is a function of the population of the district of the elected office.
So hyped-up numbers for a wild-assed hypothetical doesn't persuade.
I'm missing KM already.
--
r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj@audioimagination.com
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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Replying below:
On Wed, May 29, 2024 at 21:16 robert bristow-johnson <
rbj@audioimagination.com> wrote:
On 05/29/2024 11:00 PM EDT Michael Ossipoff email9648742@gmail.com
wrote:
Just one more astronomical reference:
Next time you look at the Milky-Way, or a long-exposure photo of it or
any galaxy:
Realize that, for every one of its estimated half-trillion stars, there
are 12 instances of having to find a candidate-name in a ranking of 135
candidate-names, when doing a handcount of Condorcet with 135 candidates
(the number that a recent California governor-election had), & 300 million
voters.
BTW, when I posted my reply to one of KM’s last posts before he
temmporarily left this list, I worded it as a reply to him, even though I’d
removed his name from the post’s “To:” field, as he’d requested.
In that reply, I often said that I didn’t know what he meant. In
philosophy it isn’t unusual for what one person says to be completely
meaningless to someone else.
That doesn’t mean that one of those people is wrong. It’s just that one
person’s philosophical framework & topic isn’t the other person’s.
KM’s philosophy of voting systems, & the philosophical framework in
which he was discussing them can rightly, validly & reasonably influence
KM’s preferences & choices among voting-systems.
But it doesn’t apply to the objective matter-of-fact Approval-properties
that I’d stated.
Reply directly below this comment:
I dunno, different countries and different states do different things.
But where I am from, the state has actual ballot access requirements. A
certain number of signatures. I think the legislature had someone do
research on some probabilistic correlation of how many signatures required
and how many candidates make it onto the ballot. How much they settled on,
I don't know but there are usually 4 or 5 candidates on the November ballot
for Governor of Vermont.
Now for IRV, 5 candidates is 205 tallies. For Condorcet-Plurality or
Condorcet-TTR, it's 25 tallies.
Not clear what you mean by a “tally”, but a Condorcet handcount is
humungously longer than an IRV count. But that’s irrelevant, because my
comparison was between Approval & Condorcet.
A Condorcet exhaustive pairwise-count with 5 candidates needs counting of
20 pairwise vote-totals. (2 for each pair of candidates).
More reply below:
But you heard of "The Paradox of Choice"? We don't want just two
candidates, we want more choices than that. But we don't want 135
candidates either on even an electronic ballot. (And I will never give up
on paper ballots and optical-scan technology, so I want all these races to
fit on a single ballot, front and back.)
There were 135 candidates in the California election that Chris referred to.
We just don't want more than the 4 or 5 most credible candidates. The way
you get sufficient credibility to be on the ballot is to get lots of valid
signatures on a petition. The number of signatures needed is a function of
the population of the district of the elected office.
…greatly favoring corporate-funded candidates who can hire all the paid
signature-gatherers they want. … resulting in economic ballot-exclusion of
honest parties.
Maybe you like that, but not all of us want it.
With N candidates, the number of pairwise-votes that must be counted in
Condorcet’s exhaustive pairwise count is 2(N-1) times the number of
approvals that must be counted in Approval.
With 5 candidates, that ratio is 8.
If that doesn’t sound like much, consider the number of voters in a
precinct.
Adequate count-security auditing is 8 times more infeasible with Condorcet
than with Approval.
5 candidates? What would that be this time?
Jull Stein, a Libertarian, RFK Jr, Biden & Trump?
One progressive? No Cornell West, or any other progressive?
…for which you gain “only” 8 times more infeasibility for an adequate
count-security audit.
So hyped-up numbers for a wild-assed hypothetical doesn't persuade.
135 candidates isn’t “hyped-up” or “wild-assed hypothetical”. That’s how
many candidates there were in the California governor-election that Cris
mentioned.
Sure, an Approval-election could reduce the field to 5. …if you really
want a handcount-audit to be 9 times more infeasible than with Approval.
I'm missing KM already.
Your fawning a**-kissing adulation is getting tiresome.
--
r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj@audioimagination.com
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
.
.
.
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