MO
Michael Ossipoff
Sun, May 26, 2024 5:28 AM
Someone keeps repeating that the voters shouldn’t have to vote
strategically. He wants the method to do it all for us, after we merely
state our sincere-rankings.
…
That’s of course a common attitude:
…
…wanting a high-tech, computation-intensive, computer-dependent system to
do it all for us, taking all the actual choosing responsibility off of
us. …sheltering
& isolating us from the choice.
…
I’ve already agreed that a completely legalistic system like a good
Condorcet method is probably the best thing for the inimical electorate in
our public-political elections.
…
...all else being equal (as KM said).
…
I pointed out that all is NOT equal. As desirable as it would be for our
inimical public-political elections, the automatic machine that does it all
for us, to isolate & shelter us from the choosing, comes at too high a
price in our public-political elections.
…
Condorcet for public political elections has a number of problems, with
count-security as the main & most serious problem. I spoke of that before,
but it just didn’t seem to get across. Hello?
…
Is it that we don’t believe that count-fraud is a genuine problem…or is it
just, so strongly do we want to believe what we believe, that we’ve
convinced ourselves that we didn’t hear?
…
Claims that Condorcet is transparent consisted of handwaving that
disregarded the fact that Condorcet requires many, many times more
computation than does Approval. …& requires many, many times more count
totals be tallied, stored, & transmitted to central-counting.
…
…a humungously, prohibitively, bigger & more computation-intensive count.
…
I’ll ask this for the 3rd time:
…
How would like you to handount-audit a Condorcet count for a many-candidate
national presidential election?
…
As for the belief (if such a belief is what this is about) that count-fraud
isn’t a problem, I’ll repeat this;
…
Look up the issues of Harper’s Magazine that came out after each of G.W.
Bushes two elections (2000 & 2004). Mountains of evidence for widespread
count-fraud. Check out the two Harpers articles.
…
One; thing they mentioned was that a supplier of voting-machines promised
to “deliver” the election to Dubya. One of the two Harper’s articles will
give you details about that.
…
It would be much better to trust the voters to use Approval well, than to
trust all of the count-personnel to not perpetrate count-fraud in the
elaborate computation-intensive Condorcet count.
…
There might be a desire to have it all done for us by a computer, but that
comes at too high a price.
…
…& that’s not counting Approval’s other advantages, including incomparably
less expensive & easier explanation, definition, proposal, enactment, &
administration…in addition to the much better count-security that I spoke
of above.
…
How bad, in your perception, is it for voters to have to make the choice
for themselves instead of just telling their preferences & having it done
for us? The Appoval-opponent I spoke of keeps saying that he wouldn’t know
whether to approve a maybe but maybe-not needed 2nd-choice. A dilemma: Risk
someone worse than him winning, or risk helping him beat your favorite?
That critic complains that that’s unacceptable.
…
Yes, with any method other than the wv Condorcet methods, you don’t know
what your objectively optimal vote is. Neither do any of the other voters,
so don’t worry about it !!
…
That critic seems to believe that it’s necessary to know your
objectively-optimal vote.
…
That’s a misbelief.
…
As I’ve said, probability & therefore expectation & its maximization depend
of what information you have & are using.
…
No, you can’t know your objectively-optimal vote.
…
But you can vote to maximize your expectation, based on the information
that you have & are using.
…
I’ve discussed that at length in previous posts, & it probably isn’t
necessary to again post about ways of choosing how to vote in Approval.
…
But, just summarize: It’s easy. Whichever of the various ways you prefer
to use, for choosing whom to approve, it’s easy. …& no, it doesn’t
require knowing your objectively-optimal vote.
…
Some of us have been so spoiled by what wv Condorcet can achieve, in doing
it all for us, with us only needing to express our sincere
preference-ordering, that we’ve come to believe that that’s necessary. …having
it all done for us, to shelter & isolate us from the choice.
…
I’ve many times pointed out that Approval’s Myerson-Weber equilibrium is
the voter-median.
…
i.e. Approval soon homes in on where the Condorcet-Winner is.
…
Have we forgotten that?
…
It seems to me that, in every one of EM’s polls, including the recent one,
Approval chose the CW.
…
Have we forgotten that?
…
The simple, reliable handtool works just fine.
…
I should add that I like wv Condorcet (RP(wv) & MinMax(wv) ) for polls,
because of course they look at more information.
…
…& I’d like them for public-political elections too, were it not for the
abovestated problems of the rank-methods.
Someone keeps repeating that the voters shouldn’t have to vote
strategically. He wants the method to do it all for us, after we merely
state our sincere-rankings.
…
That’s of course a common attitude:
…
…wanting a high-tech, computation-intensive, computer-dependent system to
do it all for us, taking all the actual choosing responsibility off of
us. …sheltering
& isolating us from the choice.
…
I’ve already agreed that a completely legalistic system like a good
Condorcet method is probably the best thing for the inimical electorate in
our public-political elections.
…
...all else being equal (as KM said).
…
I pointed out that all is NOT equal. As desirable as it would be for our
inimical public-political elections, the automatic machine that does it all
for us, to isolate & shelter us from the choosing, comes at too high a
price in our public-political elections.
…
Condorcet for public political elections has a number of problems, with
count-security as the main & most serious problem. I spoke of that before,
but it just didn’t seem to get across. Hello?
…
Is it that we don’t believe that count-fraud is a genuine problem…or is it
just, so strongly do we want to believe what we believe, that we’ve
convinced ourselves that we didn’t hear?
…
Claims that Condorcet is transparent consisted of handwaving that
disregarded the fact that Condorcet requires many, many times more
computation than does Approval. …& requires many, many times more count
totals be tallied, stored, & transmitted to central-counting.
…
…a humungously, prohibitively, bigger & more computation-intensive count.
…
I’ll ask this for the 3rd time:
…
How would like you to handount-audit a Condorcet count for a many-candidate
national presidential election?
…
As for the belief (if such a belief is what this is about) that count-fraud
isn’t a problem, I’ll repeat this;
…
Look up the issues of Harper’s Magazine that came out after each of G.W.
Bushes two elections (2000 & 2004). Mountains of evidence for widespread
count-fraud. Check out the two Harpers articles.
…
One; thing they mentioned was that a supplier of voting-machines promised
to “deliver” the election to Dubya. One of the two Harper’s articles will
give you details about that.
…
It would be much better to trust the voters to use Approval well, than to
trust all of the count-personnel to not perpetrate count-fraud in the
elaborate computation-intensive Condorcet count.
…
There might be a desire to have it all done for us by a computer, but that
comes at too high a price.
…
…& that’s not counting Approval’s other advantages, including incomparably
less expensive & easier explanation, definition, proposal, enactment, &
administration…in addition to the much better count-security that I spoke
of above.
…
How bad, in your perception, is it for voters to have to make the choice
for themselves instead of just telling their preferences & having it done
for us? The Appoval-opponent I spoke of keeps saying that he wouldn’t know
whether to approve a maybe but maybe-not needed 2nd-choice. A dilemma: Risk
someone worse than him winning, or risk helping him beat your favorite?
That critic complains that that’s unacceptable.
…
Yes, with any method other than the wv Condorcet methods, you don’t know
what your objectively optimal vote is. Neither do any of the other voters,
so don’t worry about it !!
…
That critic seems to believe that it’s necessary to know your
objectively-optimal vote.
…
That’s a misbelief.
…
As I’ve said, probability & therefore expectation & its maximization depend
of what information you have & are using.
…
No, you can’t know your objectively-optimal vote.
…
But you can vote to maximize your expectation, based on the information
that you have & are using.
…
I’ve discussed that at length in previous posts, & it probably isn’t
necessary to again post about ways of choosing how to vote in Approval.
…
But, just summarize: It’s easy. Whichever of the various ways you prefer
to use, for choosing whom to approve, it’s easy. …& no, it doesn’t
require knowing your objectively-optimal vote.
…
Some of us have been so spoiled by what wv Condorcet can achieve, in doing
it all for us, with us only needing to express our sincere
preference-ordering, that we’ve come to believe that that’s necessary. …having
it all done for us, to shelter & isolate us from the choice.
…
I’ve many times pointed out that Approval’s Myerson-Weber equilibrium is
the voter-median.
…
i.e. Approval soon homes in on where the Condorcet-Winner is.
…
Have we forgotten that?
…
It seems to me that, in every one of EM’s polls, including the recent one,
Approval chose the CW.
…
Have we forgotten that?
…
The simple, reliable handtool works just fine.
…
I should add that I like wv Condorcet (RP(wv) & MinMax(wv) ) for polls,
because of course they look at more information.
…
…& I’d like them for public-political elections too, were it not for the
abovestated problems of the rank-methods.
KM
Kristofer Munsterhjelm
Sun, May 26, 2024 11:59 AM
On 2024-05-26 07:28, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
Someone keeps repeating that the voters shouldn’t have to vote
strategically. He wants the method to do it all for us, after we merely
state our sincere-rankings.
That’s of course a common attitude:
…wanting a high-tech, computation-intensive,computer-dependent system to
do it all for us, taking all the actual choosing responsibility off of
us.…sheltering & isolating us from the choice.
I would prefer that you do not attribute opinions that the proponents
have not expressed. Nowhere have I said that Condorcet "[isolates] us
from the choice" we make.
What you call "sheltering" and "isolating", I see as the method taking
proper responsibility - proper responsibility to turn the voters'
unambiguous honest opinions into an outcome without dumping the
algorithmic calculation upon te voter themselves. See my "kick the can
down the road" post for more info.
Now, I could make a caricature of Approval itself. Perhaps something
about a calculator that just says "IDK, do the base conversion yourself,
I only accept input numbers in factoradic". But caricatures only make
people angry. Let's not stoop to them, shall we?
I’ll ask this for the 3^rd time:
…
How would like you to handount-audit a Condorcet count for a
many-candidate national presidential election?
I think your question assumes something that won't hold. If you have a
25-candidate presidential election, you've already lost, because nobody
is going to rank 25 candidates, irrespective of whether the method is
Condorcet, IRV, or Borda.
I'm not familiar with minor parties in the US. Has there ever been a
25-candidate presidential election?
I don't think I can comment beyond that: I don't know enough about poll
workers. I'll leave that to someone with experience. (Although roughly
calculating: suppose 6 candidates like in Burlington. That's 30 pairs.
Five times the work if counting a particular preference is as before. So
you'd either need 5x the workers, or five times the time, or some
combination of the two.)
On an aside, though, I would say that I generally wouldn't want to get
computers anywhere near election counting. However, if you absolutely
have to have them, there are ways of making sure they don't cheat:
formal verification. You could also create special-purpose tools that
say, only turn ranks into matrices and nothing else: there's no reason
(apart from programmer convenience) why an election tool should be a
general purpose computer that you could hide all sorts of shenanigans in.
I’ve discussed that at length in previous posts, & it probably isn’t
necessary to again post about ways of choosing how to vote in Approval.
But, just summarize:It’s easy.Whichever of the various ways you prefer
to use, for choosing whom to approve, it’s easy.…& no, it doesn’t
require knowing your objectively-optimal vote.
I’ve many times pointed out that Approval’s Myerson-Weber equilibrium is
the voter-median.
i.e. Approval soon homes in on where the Condorcet-Winner is.
Not necessarily. See the following paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04216v2
According to the authors, under their model, if every voter follows a
particular thresholding rule, then iterative approval generally arrives
at the Condorcet winner (but not always). However, if voters are left to
choose any thresholding rule they want (as you propose), then anything
is possible. The arrangement might even elect a Condorcet loser, and the
outcome may be slow to converge or who wins may depend on how many polls
you hold.
I'm reminded of a quote about distributed algorithms that I read
somewhere: "It's really easy to design distributed algorithms that
suffer from deadlock, network floods or widely unpredictable and bizarre
oscillations". That's in the context of computer science - deadlocks
might not be applicable to election methods. But it does justify a
starting position of skepticisim when considering schemes that offload
more of the work to the voters by turning a one-shot method into a
dynamical system.
It seems to me that, in every one of EM’s polls, including the recent
one, Approval chose the CW.
Have we forgotten that?
I haven't, nor have I forgotten that Approval wasn't actually the poll
winner.
But let's take this reasoning at face value. I don't have the other
polls' ballot data available at the moment, so let's consider the latest
one and pick... say, Borda.
As one can see by going to https://munsterhjelm.no/km/rbvote/calc.html,
pasting in the data, and clicking Borda, Ranked Pairs is also the Borda
winner.
But I don't think I'm going to start advocating for Borda.
To not be accused of tu quoque, let me clarify the point. As Burlington
shows, an election method needs to handle the hard cases, not just the
easy ones, or there may be a considerable uproar when the method is
faced with a hard case and then stumbles. (In addition, people trying to
make sure a stumble doesn't happen may start to do mass compromising,
further entrenching two-party rule.)
So it's quite possible that our polls are easy cases. But like FairVote
claiming that IRV gets the Condorcet winner more than 90% of the time,
that doesn't by itself tell us much, because the failures have such a
strong impact.
I illustrate the example above by picking a method we know to be bad
(Borda being so extremely easy to fool with cloning and burial), and
showing that the poll result comes out right. If a bad method can get a
good result, then "getting a good result" is less useful than it might
appear at first glance.
-km
On 2024-05-26 07:28, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
> Someone keeps repeating that the voters shouldn’t have to vote
> strategically. He wants the method to do it all for us, after we merely
> state our sincere-rankings.
>
> That’s of course a common attitude:
>
> …wanting a high-tech, computation-intensive,computer-dependent system to
> do it all for us, taking all the actual choosing responsibility off of
> us.…sheltering & isolating us from the choice.
I would prefer that you do not attribute opinions that the proponents
have not expressed. Nowhere have I said that Condorcet "[isolates] us
from the choice" we make.
What you call "sheltering" and "isolating", I see as the method taking
proper responsibility - proper responsibility to turn the voters'
unambiguous honest opinions into an outcome without dumping the
algorithmic calculation upon te voter themselves. See my "kick the can
down the road" post for more info.
Now, I could make a caricature of Approval itself. Perhaps something
about a calculator that just says "IDK, do the base conversion yourself,
I only accept input numbers in factoradic". But caricatures only make
people angry. Let's not stoop to them, shall we?
> I’ll ask this for the 3^rd time:
>
> …
>
> How would like you to handount-audit a Condorcet count for a
> many-candidate national presidential election?
I think your question assumes something that won't hold. If you have a
25-candidate presidential election, you've already lost, because nobody
is going to rank 25 candidates, irrespective of whether the method is
Condorcet, IRV, or Borda.
I'm not familiar with minor parties in the US. Has there ever been a
25-candidate presidential election?
I don't think I can comment beyond that: I don't know enough about poll
workers. I'll leave that to someone with experience. (Although roughly
calculating: suppose 6 candidates like in Burlington. That's 30 pairs.
Five times the work if counting a particular preference is as before. So
you'd either need 5x the workers, or five times the time, or some
combination of the two.)
On an aside, though, I would say that I generally wouldn't want to get
computers anywhere near election counting. However, if you absolutely
have to have them, there are ways of making sure they don't cheat:
formal verification. You could also create special-purpose tools that
say, only turn ranks into matrices and nothing else: there's no reason
(apart from programmer convenience) why an election tool should be a
general purpose computer that you could hide all sorts of shenanigans in.
> I’ve discussed that at length in previous posts, & it probably isn’t
> necessary to again post about ways of choosing how to vote in Approval.
>
> But, just summarize:It’s easy.Whichever of the various ways you prefer
> to use, for choosing whom to approve, it’s easy.…& no, it doesn’t
> require knowing your objectively-optimal vote.
>
> I’ve many times pointed out that Approval’s Myerson-Weber equilibrium is
> the voter-median.
>
> i.e. Approval soon homes in on where the Condorcet-Winner is.
Not necessarily. See the following paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04216v2
According to the authors, under their model, if every voter follows a
particular thresholding rule, then iterative approval generally arrives
at the Condorcet winner (but not always). However, if voters are left to
choose any thresholding rule they want (as you propose), then anything
is possible. The arrangement might even elect a Condorcet loser, and the
outcome may be slow to converge or who wins may depend on how many polls
you hold.
I'm reminded of a quote about distributed algorithms that I read
somewhere: "It's really easy to design distributed algorithms that
suffer from deadlock, network floods or widely unpredictable and bizarre
oscillations". That's in the context of computer science - deadlocks
might not be applicable to election methods. But it does justify a
starting position of skepticisim when considering schemes that offload
more of the work to the voters by turning a one-shot method into a
dynamical system.
> It seems to me that, in every one of EM’s polls, including the recent
> one, Approval chose the CW.
>
> Have we forgotten that?
I haven't, nor have I forgotten that Approval wasn't actually the poll
winner.
But let's take this reasoning at face value. I don't have the other
polls' ballot data available at the moment, so let's consider the latest
one and pick... say, Borda.
As one can see by going to https://munsterhjelm.no/km/rbvote/calc.html,
pasting in the data, and clicking Borda, Ranked Pairs is also the Borda
winner.
But I don't think I'm going to start advocating for Borda.
To not be accused of tu quoque, let me clarify the point. As Burlington
shows, an election method needs to handle the hard cases, not just the
easy ones, or there may be a considerable uproar when the method is
faced with a hard case and then stumbles. (In addition, people trying to
make sure a stumble doesn't happen may start to do mass compromising,
further entrenching two-party rule.)
So it's quite possible that our polls are easy cases. But like FairVote
claiming that IRV gets the Condorcet winner more than 90% of the time,
that doesn't by itself tell us much, because the failures have such a
strong impact.
I illustrate the example above by picking a method we know to be bad
(Borda being so extremely easy to fool with cloning and burial), and
showing that the poll result comes out right. If a bad method can get a
good result, then "getting a good result" is less useful than it might
appear at first glance.
-km
MO
Michael Ossipoff
Sun, May 26, 2024 7:25 PM
On 2024-05-26 07:28, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
Someone keeps repeating that the voters shouldn’t have to vote
strategically. He wants the method to do it all for us, after we merely
state our sincere-rankings.
That’s of course a common attitude:
…wanting a high-tech, computation-intensive,computer-dependent system to
do it all for us, taking all the actual choosing responsibility off of
us.…sheltering & isolating us from the choice.
I would prefer that you do not attribute opinions that the proponents
have not expressed. Nowhere have I said…
Whoa. I didn’t mention you. I said only “someone”. I wasn’t referring to
you.
…that Condorcet "[isolates] us
from the choice" we make.
I didn’t quote anyone as saying that. .I used that phrase, but I didn’t
say that anyone else did.
What you call "sheltering" and "isolating", I see as the method taking
proper responsibility - proper responsibility to turn the voters'
unambiguous honest opinions into an outcome without dumping the
algorithmic calculation upon te voter themselves.
…a different wording for the same thing.
See my "kick the can
down the road" post for more info.
Now, I could make a caricature of Approval itself. Perhaps something
about a calculator that just says "IDK, do the base conversion yourself,
I only accept input numbers in factoradic". But caricatures only make
people angry.
Or puzzled. I have no idea what that would mean, or how that supposed
analogy applies.
But, since you aren’t saying it, we can dismiss the matter.
Let's not stoop to them, shall we?
I didn’t “caricature”. I described the goal of rank-methods, in agreement
with your description, with different wording.
Approval is a simple reliable do-it-yourself handtool. Rank-methods seek to
allow you to merely express a sincere ranking & say”now you fix it”,
instead of actually dealing with the choice as you’d have to without that
humungously computation-intensive automatic machine.
I’ll ask this for the 3^rd time:
…
How would like you to handount-audit a Condorcet count for a
many-candidate national presidential election?
I think your question assumes something that won't hold. If you have a
25-candidate presidential election,…
However many candidates you have, a Condorcet-count is much more
complicated & computationally-intensive than the summation of approvals.
With a given number of people & hours the ability to detect count-fraud is
less with Condorcet.
I said that Approval has been choosing the CW in our polls. I didn’t say
that it was the poll winner (though it has won in 1 or more of our polls).
I didn’t comment any farther down in this text. I say that, because it’s
easier to say it than deleting the rest of the text.
I sent this quick preliminary reply to answer the misunderstanding about
the matter of whom I was referring to.
I haven’t yet replied to your other post because it’s mor involved than
this one.
But as for putting the choice on the voters instead of just collecting
sincere rankings, yes that’s what I prefer.
…because using the absolute minimal method, with the least demanding count,
is that important, for count-fraud prevention.
…with immense benefits for easier explanation, defined, enactment, &
admission too.
(Autocorrect can be a nuisance. I’m not used to having to check my whole
post for autocorrect’s word-changes.)
you've already lost, because nobody
is going to rank 25 candidates, irrespective of whether the method is
Condorcet, IRV, or Borda.
I'm not familiar with minor parties in the US. Has there ever been a
25-candidate presidential election?
I don't think I can comment beyond that: I don't know enough about poll
workers. I'll leave that to someone with experience. (Although roughly
calculating: suppose 6 candidates like in Burlington. That's 30 pairs.
Five times the work if counting a particular preference is as before. So
you'd either need 5x the workers, or five times the time, or some
combination of the two.)
On an aside, though, I would say that I generally wouldn't want to get
computers anywhere near election counting. However, if you absolutely
have to have them, there are ways of making sure they don't cheat:
formal verification. You could also create special-purpose tools that
say, only turn ranks into matrices and nothing else: there's no reason
(apart from programmer convenience) why an election tool should be a
general purpose computer that you could hide all sorts of shenanigans in.
I’ve discussed that at length in previous posts, & it probably isn’t
necessary to again post about ways of choosing how to vote in Approval.
But, just summarize:It’s easy.Whichever of the various ways you prefer
to use, for choosing whom to approve, it’s easy.…& no, it doesn’t
require knowing your objectively-optimal vote.
I’ve many times pointed out that Approval’s Myerson-Weber equilibrium is
the voter-median.
i.e. Approval soon homes in on where the Condorcet-Winner is.
Not necessarily. See the following paper:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04216v2
According to the authors, under their model, if every voter follows a
particular thresholding rule, then iterative approval generally arrives
at the Condorcet winner (but not always). However, if voters are left to
choose any thresholding rule they want (as you propose), then anything
is possible. The arrangement might even elect a Condorcet loser, and the
outcome may be slow to converge or who wins may depend on how many polls
you hold.
I'm reminded of a quote about distributed algorithms that I read
somewhere: "It's really easy to design distributed algorithms that
suffer from deadlock, network floods or widely unpredictable and bizarre
oscillations". That's in the context of computer science - deadlocks
might not be applicable to election methods. But it does justify a
starting position of skepticisim when considering schemes that offload
more of the work to the voters by turning a one-shot method into a
dynamical system.
It seems to me that, in every one of EM’s polls, including the recent
one, Approval chose the CW.
Have we forgotten that?
I haven't, nor have I forgotten that Approval wasn't actually the poll
winner.
But let's take this reasoning at face value. I don't have the other
polls' ballot data available at the moment, so let's consider the latest
one and pick... say, Borda.
As one can see by going to https://munsterhjelm.no/km/rbvote/calc.html,
pasting in the data, and clicking Borda, Ranked Pairs is also the Borda
winner.
But I don't think I'm going to start advocating for Borda.
To not be accused of tu quoque, let me clarify the point. As Burlington
shows, an election method needs to handle the hard cases, not just the
easy ones, or there may be a considerable uproar when the method is
faced with a hard case and then stumbles. (In addition, people trying to
make sure a stumble doesn't happen may start to do mass compromising,
further entrenching two-party rule.)
So it's quite possible that our polls are easy cases. But like FairVote
claiming that IRV gets the Condorcet winner more than 90% of the time,
that doesn't by itself tell us much, because the failures have such a
strong impact.
I illustrate the example above by picking a method we know to be bad
(Borda being so extremely easy to fool with cloning and burial), and
showing that the poll result comes out right. If a bad method can get a
good result, then "getting a good result" is less useful than it might
appear at first glance.
-km
On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 04:59 Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet@t-online.de>
wrote:
> On 2024-05-26 07:28, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
> > Someone keeps repeating that the voters shouldn’t have to vote
> > strategically. He wants the method to do it all for us, after we merely
> > state our sincere-rankings.
> >
> > That’s of course a common attitude:
> >
> > …wanting a high-tech, computation-intensive,computer-dependent system to
> > do it all for us, taking all the actual choosing responsibility off of
> > us.…sheltering & isolating us from the choice.
>
> I would prefer that you do not attribute opinions that the proponents
> have not expressed. Nowhere have I said…
Whoa. I didn’t mention you. I said only “someone”. I wasn’t referring to
you.
>
…that Condorcet "[isolates] us
> from the choice" we make.
I didn’t quote anyone as saying that. .*I* used that phrase, but I didn’t
say that anyone else did.
>
> What you call "sheltering" and "isolating", I see as the method taking
> proper responsibility - proper responsibility to turn the voters'
> unambiguous honest opinions into an outcome without dumping the
> algorithmic calculation upon te voter themselves.
…a different wording for the same thing.
See my "kick the can
> down the road" post for more info.
>
> Now, I could make a caricature of Approval itself. Perhaps something
> about a calculator that just says "IDK, do the base conversion yourself,
> I only accept input numbers in factoradic". But caricatures only make
> people angry.
Or puzzled. I have no idea what that would mean, or how that supposed
analogy applies.
But, since you aren’t saying it, we can dismiss the matter.
Let's not stoop to them, shall we?
I didn’t “caricature”. I described the goal of rank-methods, in agreement
with your description, with different wording.
Approval is a simple reliable do-it-yourself handtool. Rank-methods seek to
allow you to merely express a sincere ranking & say”now you fix it”,
instead of actually dealing with the choice as you’d have to without that
humungously computation-intensive automatic machine.
>
>
> > I’ll ask this for the 3^rd time:
> >
> > …
> >
> > How would like you to handount-audit a Condorcet count for a
> > many-candidate national presidential election?
>
> I think your question assumes something that won't hold. If you have a
> 25-candidate presidential election,…
However many candidates you have, a Condorcet-count is much more
complicated & computationally-intensive than the summation of approvals.
With a given number of people & hours the ability to detect count-fraud is
less with Condorcet.
I said that Approval has been choosing the CW in our polls. I didn’t say
that it was the poll winner (though it has won in 1 or more of our polls).
I didn’t comment any farther down in this text. I say that, because it’s
easier to say it than deleting the rest of the text.
I sent this quick preliminary reply to answer the misunderstanding about
the matter of whom I was referring to.
I haven’t yet replied to your other post because it’s mor involved than
this one.
But as for putting the choice on the voters instead of just collecting
sincere rankings, yes that’s what I prefer.
…because using the absolute minimal method, with the least demanding count,
is that important, for count-fraud prevention.
…with immense benefits for easier explanation, defined, enactment, &
admission too.
(Autocorrect can be a nuisance. I’m not used to having to check my whole
post for autocorrect’s word-changes.)
you've already lost, because nobody
> is going to rank 25 candidates, irrespective of whether the method is
> Condorcet, IRV, or Borda.
>
> I'm not familiar with minor parties in the US. Has there ever been a
> 25-candidate presidential election?
>
> I don't think I can comment beyond that: I don't know enough about poll
> workers. I'll leave that to someone with experience. (Although roughly
> calculating: suppose 6 candidates like in Burlington. That's 30 pairs.
> Five times the work if counting a particular preference is as before. So
> you'd either need 5x the workers, or five times the time, or some
> combination of the two.)
>
> On an aside, though, I would say that I generally wouldn't want to get
> computers anywhere near election counting. However, if you absolutely
> have to have them, there are ways of making sure they don't cheat:
> formal verification. You could also create special-purpose tools that
> say, only turn ranks into matrices and nothing else: there's no reason
> (apart from programmer convenience) why an election tool should be a
> general purpose computer that you could hide all sorts of shenanigans in.
>
> > I’ve discussed that at length in previous posts, & it probably isn’t
> > necessary to again post about ways of choosing how to vote in Approval.
> >
> > But, just summarize:It’s easy.Whichever of the various ways you prefer
> > to use, for choosing whom to approve, it’s easy.…& no, it doesn’t
> > require knowing your objectively-optimal vote.
>
> >
> > I’ve many times pointed out that Approval’s Myerson-Weber equilibrium is
> > the voter-median.
> >
> > i.e. Approval soon homes in on where the Condorcet-Winner is.
>
> Not necessarily. See the following paper:
> https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04216v2
>
> According to the authors, under their model, if every voter follows a
> particular thresholding rule, then iterative approval generally arrives
> at the Condorcet winner (but not always). However, if voters are left to
> choose any thresholding rule they want (as you propose), then anything
> is possible. The arrangement might even elect a Condorcet loser, and the
> outcome may be slow to converge or who wins may depend on how many polls
> you hold.
>
> I'm reminded of a quote about distributed algorithms that I read
> somewhere: "It's really easy to design distributed algorithms that
> suffer from deadlock, network floods or widely unpredictable and bizarre
> oscillations". That's in the context of computer science - deadlocks
> might not be applicable to election methods. But it does justify a
> starting position of skepticisim when considering schemes that offload
> more of the work to the voters by turning a one-shot method into a
> dynamical system.
>
> > It seems to me that, in every one of EM’s polls, including the recent
> > one, Approval chose the CW.
> >
> > Have we forgotten that?
>
> I haven't, nor have I forgotten that Approval wasn't actually the poll
> winner.
>
> But let's take this reasoning at face value. I don't have the other
> polls' ballot data available at the moment, so let's consider the latest
> one and pick... say, Borda.
>
> As one can see by going to https://munsterhjelm.no/km/rbvote/calc.html,
> pasting in the data, and clicking Borda, Ranked Pairs is also the Borda
> winner.
>
> But I don't think I'm going to start advocating for Borda.
>
>
> To not be accused of tu quoque, let me clarify the point. As Burlington
> shows, an election method needs to handle the hard cases, not just the
> easy ones, or there may be a considerable uproar when the method is
> faced with a hard case and then stumbles. (In addition, people trying to
> make sure a stumble doesn't happen may start to do mass compromising,
> further entrenching two-party rule.)
>
> So it's quite possible that our polls are easy cases. But like FairVote
> claiming that IRV gets the Condorcet winner more than 90% of the time,
> that doesn't by itself tell us much, because the failures have such a
> strong impact.
>
> I illustrate the example above by picking a method we know to be bad
> (Borda being so extremely easy to fool with cloning and burial), and
> showing that the poll result comes out right. If a bad method can get a
> good result, then "getting a good result" is less useful than it might
> appear at first glance.
>
> -km
>
MO
Michael Ossipoff
Sun, May 26, 2024 7:33 PM
In one of the last paragraphs, I wrote:
“…easier explanation, definition, enactment, & administration.”
..,but I didn’t catch autocratic’s word-changes.
On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 12:25 Michael Ossipoff email9648742@gmail.com
wrote:
On 2024-05-26 07:28, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
Someone keeps repeating that the voters shouldn’t have to vote
strategically. He wants the method to do it all for us, after we merely
state our sincere-rankings.
That’s of course a common attitude:
…wanting a high-tech, computation-intensive,computer-dependent system
do it all for us, taking all the actual choosing responsibility off of
us.…sheltering & isolating us from the choice.
I would prefer that you do not attribute opinions that the proponents
have not expressed. Nowhere have I said…
Whoa. I didn’t mention you. I said only “someone”. I wasn’t referring to
you.
…that Condorcet "[isolates] us
from the choice" we make.
I didn’t quote anyone as saying that. .I used that phrase, but I didn’t
say that anyone else did.
What you call "sheltering" and "isolating", I see as the method taking
proper responsibility - proper responsibility to turn the voters'
unambiguous honest opinions into an outcome without dumping the
algorithmic calculation upon te voter themselves.
…a different wording for the same thing.
See my "kick the can
down the road" post for more info.
Now, I could make a caricature of Approval itself. Perhaps something
about a calculator that just says "IDK, do the base conversion yourself,
I only accept input numbers in factoradic". But caricatures only make
people angry.
Or puzzled. I have no idea what that would mean, or how that supposed
analogy applies.
But, since you aren’t saying it, we can dismiss the matter.
Let's not stoop to them, shall we?
I didn’t “caricature”. I described the goal of rank-methods, in agreement
with your description, with different wording.
Approval is a simple reliable do-it-yourself handtool. Rank-methods seek
to allow you to merely express a sincere ranking & say”now you fix it”,
instead of actually dealing with the choice as you’d have to without that
humungously computation-intensive automatic machine.
I’ll ask this for the 3^rd time:
…
How would like you to handount-audit a Condorcet count for a
many-candidate national presidential election?
I think your question assumes something that won't hold. If you have a
25-candidate presidential election,…
However many candidates you have, a Condorcet-count is much more
complicated & computationally-intensive than the summation of approvals.
With a given number of people & hours the ability to detect count-fraud is
less with Condorcet.
I said that Approval has been choosing the CW in our polls. I didn’t say
that it was the poll winner (though it has won in 1 or more of our polls).
I didn’t comment any farther down in this text. I say that, because it’s
easier to say it than deleting the rest of the text.
I sent this quick preliminary reply to answer the misunderstanding about
the matter of whom I was referring to.
I haven’t yet replied to your other post because it’s mor involved than
this one.
But as for putting the choice on the voters instead of just collecting
sincere rankings, yes that’s what I prefer.
…because using the absolute minimal method, with the least demanding
count, is that important, for count-fraud prevention.
…with immense benefits for easier explanation, defined, enactment, &
admission too.
(Autocorrect can be a nuisance. I’m not used to having to check my whole
post for autocorrect’s word-changes.)
you've already lost, because nobody
is going to rank 25 candidates, irrespective of whether the method is
Condorcet, IRV, or Borda.
I'm not familiar with minor parties in the US. Has there ever been a
25-candidate presidential election?
I don't think I can comment beyond that: I don't know enough about poll
workers. I'll leave that to someone with experience. (Although roughly
calculating: suppose 6 candidates like in Burlington. That's 30 pairs.
Five times the work if counting a particular preference is as before. So
you'd either need 5x the workers, or five times the time, or some
combination of the two.)
On an aside, though, I would say that I generally wouldn't want to get
computers anywhere near election counting. However, if you absolutely
have to have them, there are ways of making sure they don't cheat:
formal verification. You could also create special-purpose tools that
say, only turn ranks into matrices and nothing else: there's no reason
(apart from programmer convenience) why an election tool should be a
general purpose computer that you could hide all sorts of shenanigans in.
I’ve discussed that at length in previous posts, & it probably isn’t
necessary to again post about ways of choosing how to vote in Approval.
But, just summarize:It’s easy.Whichever of the various ways you prefer
to use, for choosing whom to approve, it’s easy.…& no, it doesn’t
require knowing your objectively-optimal vote.
I’ve many times pointed out that Approval’s Myerson-Weber equilibrium
the voter-median.
i.e. Approval soon homes in on where the Condorcet-Winner is.
Not necessarily. See the following paper:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04216v2
According to the authors, under their model, if every voter follows a
particular thresholding rule, then iterative approval generally arrives
at the Condorcet winner (but not always). However, if voters are left to
choose any thresholding rule they want (as you propose), then anything
is possible. The arrangement might even elect a Condorcet loser, and the
outcome may be slow to converge or who wins may depend on how many polls
you hold.
I'm reminded of a quote about distributed algorithms that I read
somewhere: "It's really easy to design distributed algorithms that
suffer from deadlock, network floods or widely unpredictable and bizarre
oscillations". That's in the context of computer science - deadlocks
might not be applicable to election methods. But it does justify a
starting position of skepticisim when considering schemes that offload
more of the work to the voters by turning a one-shot method into a
dynamical system.
It seems to me that, in every one of EM’s polls, including the recent
one, Approval chose the CW.
Have we forgotten that?
I haven't, nor have I forgotten that Approval wasn't actually the poll
winner.
But let's take this reasoning at face value. I don't have the other
polls' ballot data available at the moment, so let's consider the latest
one and pick... say, Borda.
As one can see by going to https://munsterhjelm.no/km/rbvote/calc.html,
pasting in the data, and clicking Borda, Ranked Pairs is also the Borda
winner.
But I don't think I'm going to start advocating for Borda.
To not be accused of tu quoque, let me clarify the point. As Burlington
shows, an election method needs to handle the hard cases, not just the
easy ones, or there may be a considerable uproar when the method is
faced with a hard case and then stumbles. (In addition, people trying to
make sure a stumble doesn't happen may start to do mass compromising,
further entrenching two-party rule.)
So it's quite possible that our polls are easy cases. But like FairVote
claiming that IRV gets the Condorcet winner more than 90% of the time,
that doesn't by itself tell us much, because the failures have such a
strong impact.
I illustrate the example above by picking a method we know to be bad
(Borda being so extremely easy to fool with cloning and burial), and
showing that the poll result comes out right. If a bad method can get a
good result, then "getting a good result" is less useful than it might
appear at first glance.
-km
In one of the last paragraphs, I wrote:
“…easier explanation, definition, enactment, & administration.”
..,but I didn’t catch autocratic’s word-changes.
On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 12:25 Michael Ossipoff <email9648742@gmail.com>
wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 04:59 Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet@t-online.de>
> wrote:
>
>> On 2024-05-26 07:28, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
>> > Someone keeps repeating that the voters shouldn’t have to vote
>> > strategically. He wants the method to do it all for us, after we merely
>> > state our sincere-rankings.
>> >
>> > That’s of course a common attitude:
>> >
>> > …wanting a high-tech, computation-intensive,computer-dependent system
>> to
>> > do it all for us, taking all the actual choosing responsibility off of
>> > us.…sheltering & isolating us from the choice.
>>
>> I would prefer that you do not attribute opinions that the proponents
>> have not expressed. Nowhere have I said…
>
>
> Whoa. I didn’t mention you. I said only “someone”. I wasn’t referring to
> you.
>
>>
>
> …that Condorcet "[isolates] us
>> from the choice" we make.
>
>
> I didn’t quote anyone as saying that. .*I* used that phrase, but I didn’t
> say that anyone else did.
>
>
>>
>> What you call "sheltering" and "isolating", I see as the method taking
>> proper responsibility - proper responsibility to turn the voters'
>> unambiguous honest opinions into an outcome without dumping the
>> algorithmic calculation upon te voter themselves.
>
>
> …a different wording for the same thing.
>
>
> See my "kick the can
>> down the road" post for more info.
>>
>> Now, I could make a caricature of Approval itself. Perhaps something
>> about a calculator that just says "IDK, do the base conversion yourself,
>> I only accept input numbers in factoradic". But caricatures only make
>> people angry.
>
>
> Or puzzled. I have no idea what that would mean, or how that supposed
> analogy applies.
> But, since you aren’t saying it, we can dismiss the matter.
>
>
> Let's not stoop to them, shall we?
>
>
> I didn’t “caricature”. I described the goal of rank-methods, in agreement
> with your description, with different wording.
>
> Approval is a simple reliable do-it-yourself handtool. Rank-methods seek
> to allow you to merely express a sincere ranking & say”now you fix it”,
> instead of actually dealing with the choice as you’d have to without that
> humungously computation-intensive automatic machine.
>
>>
>>
>> > I’ll ask this for the 3^rd time:
>> >
>> > …
>> >
>> > How would like you to handount-audit a Condorcet count for a
>> > many-candidate national presidential election?
>>
>> I think your question assumes something that won't hold. If you have a
>> 25-candidate presidential election,…
>
>
> However many candidates you have, a Condorcet-count is much more
> complicated & computationally-intensive than the summation of approvals.
>
> With a given number of people & hours the ability to detect count-fraud is
> less with Condorcet.
>
> I said that Approval has been choosing the CW in our polls. I didn’t say
> that it was the poll winner (though it has won in 1 or more of our polls).
>
> I didn’t comment any farther down in this text. I say that, because it’s
> easier to say it than deleting the rest of the text.
>
> I sent this quick preliminary reply to answer the misunderstanding about
> the matter of whom I was referring to.
>
> I haven’t yet replied to your other post because it’s mor involved than
> this one.
>
> But as for putting the choice on the voters instead of just collecting
> sincere rankings, yes that’s what I prefer.
>
> …because using the absolute minimal method, with the least demanding
> count, is that important, for count-fraud prevention.
>
> …with immense benefits for easier explanation, defined, enactment, &
> admission too.
>
> (Autocorrect can be a nuisance. I’m not used to having to check my whole
> post for autocorrect’s word-changes.)
>
>
> you've already lost, because nobody
>> is going to rank 25 candidates, irrespective of whether the method is
>> Condorcet, IRV, or Borda.
>>
>> I'm not familiar with minor parties in the US. Has there ever been a
>> 25-candidate presidential election?
>>
>> I don't think I can comment beyond that: I don't know enough about poll
>> workers. I'll leave that to someone with experience. (Although roughly
>> calculating: suppose 6 candidates like in Burlington. That's 30 pairs.
>> Five times the work if counting a particular preference is as before. So
>> you'd either need 5x the workers, or five times the time, or some
>> combination of the two.)
>>
>> On an aside, though, I would say that I generally wouldn't want to get
>> computers anywhere near election counting. However, if you absolutely
>> have to have them, there are ways of making sure they don't cheat:
>> formal verification. You could also create special-purpose tools that
>> say, only turn ranks into matrices and nothing else: there's no reason
>> (apart from programmer convenience) why an election tool should be a
>> general purpose computer that you could hide all sorts of shenanigans in.
>>
>> > I’ve discussed that at length in previous posts, & it probably isn’t
>> > necessary to again post about ways of choosing how to vote in Approval.
>> >
>> > But, just summarize:It’s easy.Whichever of the various ways you prefer
>> > to use, for choosing whom to approve, it’s easy.…& no, it doesn’t
>> > require knowing your objectively-optimal vote.
>>
>> >
>> > I’ve many times pointed out that Approval’s Myerson-Weber equilibrium
>> is
>> > the voter-median.
>> >
>> > i.e. Approval soon homes in on where the Condorcet-Winner is.
>>
>> Not necessarily. See the following paper:
>> https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04216v2
>>
>> According to the authors, under their model, if every voter follows a
>> particular thresholding rule, then iterative approval generally arrives
>> at the Condorcet winner (but not always). However, if voters are left to
>> choose any thresholding rule they want (as you propose), then anything
>> is possible. The arrangement might even elect a Condorcet loser, and the
>> outcome may be slow to converge or who wins may depend on how many polls
>> you hold.
>>
>> I'm reminded of a quote about distributed algorithms that I read
>> somewhere: "It's really easy to design distributed algorithms that
>> suffer from deadlock, network floods or widely unpredictable and bizarre
>> oscillations". That's in the context of computer science - deadlocks
>> might not be applicable to election methods. But it does justify a
>> starting position of skepticisim when considering schemes that offload
>> more of the work to the voters by turning a one-shot method into a
>> dynamical system.
>>
>> > It seems to me that, in every one of EM’s polls, including the recent
>> > one, Approval chose the CW.
>> >
>> > Have we forgotten that?
>>
>> I haven't, nor have I forgotten that Approval wasn't actually the poll
>> winner.
>>
>> But let's take this reasoning at face value. I don't have the other
>> polls' ballot data available at the moment, so let's consider the latest
>> one and pick... say, Borda.
>>
>> As one can see by going to https://munsterhjelm.no/km/rbvote/calc.html,
>> pasting in the data, and clicking Borda, Ranked Pairs is also the Borda
>> winner.
>>
>> But I don't think I'm going to start advocating for Borda.
>>
>>
>> To not be accused of tu quoque, let me clarify the point. As Burlington
>> shows, an election method needs to handle the hard cases, not just the
>> easy ones, or there may be a considerable uproar when the method is
>> faced with a hard case and then stumbles. (In addition, people trying to
>> make sure a stumble doesn't happen may start to do mass compromising,
>> further entrenching two-party rule.)
>>
>> So it's quite possible that our polls are easy cases. But like FairVote
>> claiming that IRV gets the Condorcet winner more than 90% of the time,
>> that doesn't by itself tell us much, because the failures have such a
>> strong impact.
>>
>> I illustrate the example above by picking a method we know to be bad
>> (Borda being so extremely easy to fool with cloning and burial), and
>> showing that the poll result comes out right. If a bad method can get a
>> good result, then "getting a good result" is less useful than it might
>> appear at first glance.
>>
>> -km
>>
>
RB
robert bristow-johnson
Sun, May 26, 2024 7:38 PM
On 2024-05-26 07:28, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
Someone keeps repeating that the voters shouldn’t have to vote
strategically. He wants the method to do it all for us, after we merely
state our sincere-rankings.
That’s of course a common attitude:
…wanting a high-tech, computation-intensive,computer-dependent system to
do it all for us, taking all the actual choosing responsibility off of
us.…sheltering & isolating us from the choice.
I would prefer that you do not attribute opinions that the proponents
have not expressed. Nowhere have I said…
Whoa. I didn’t mention you. I said only “someone”. I wasn’t referring to you.
Actually, I thought you were referring to me.
Anyway, let's give Kristofer a break that he is seeking.
But that doesn't mean that I will engage you in his absence. As I told Kristofer, I sometimes have to budget my physical, mental, and emotional energy.
--
r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj@audioimagination.com
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
.
.
.
> On 05/26/2024 3:25 PM EDT Michael Ossipoff <email9648742@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 04:59 Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet@t-online.de> wrote:
> > On 2024-05-26 07:28, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
> > > Someone keeps repeating that the voters shouldn’t have to vote
> > > strategically. He wants the method to do it all for us, after we merely
> > > state our sincere-rankings.
> > >
> > > That’s of course a common attitude:
> > >
> > > …wanting a high-tech, computation-intensive,computer-dependent system to
> > > do it all for us, taking all the actual choosing responsibility off of
> > > us.…sheltering & isolating us from the choice.
> >
> > I would prefer that you do not attribute opinions that the proponents
> > have not expressed. Nowhere have I said…
>
> Whoa. I didn’t mention you. I said only “someone”. I wasn’t referring to you.
>
Actually, I thought you were referring to me.
Anyway, let's give Kristofer a break that he is seeking.
But that doesn't mean that I will engage you in his absence. As I told Kristofer, I sometimes have to budget my physical, mental, and emotional energy.
--
r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj@audioimagination.com
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
.
.
.
CB
Chris Benham
Sun, May 26, 2024 7:56 PM
I think your question assumes something that won't hold. If you have a
25-candidate presidential election, you've already lost, because
nobody is going to rank 25 candidates, irrespective of whether the
method is Condorcet, IRV, or Borda.
So what? Truncation should be allowed and so the voters will probably
just do that to a lot of the candidates. How is that a problem?
I should say that 25 candidates on the presidential ballot is more
likely to be a success than some sort of "failure" because it might mean
that ballot access has granted to serious candidates representing a wide
range of opinions.
Alternatively they could all be ego-tripping corporate clones and/or
unserious stooge candidates that are only running to help one of the
major candidates by attracting voters who might otherwise stay home and
then funnelling their preferences to that major candidate.
In 2003 there was California gubernatorial election with 135 candidates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_California_gubernatorial_recall_election#Results
Chris B.
On 26/05/2024 9:29 pm, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
On 2024-05-26 07:28, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
Someone keeps repeating that the voters shouldn’t have to vote
strategically. He wants the method to do it all for us, after we
merely state our sincere-rankings.
That’s of course a common attitude:
…wanting a high-tech, computation-intensive,computer-dependent system
to do it all for us, taking all the actual choosing responsibility
off of us.…sheltering & isolating us from the choice.
I would prefer that you do not attribute opinions that the proponents
have not expressed. Nowhere have I said that Condorcet "[isolates] us
from the choice" we make.
What you call "sheltering" and "isolating", I see as the method taking
proper responsibility - proper responsibility to turn the voters'
unambiguous honest opinions into an outcome without dumping the
algorithmic calculation upon te voter themselves. See my "kick the can
down the road" post for more info.
Now, I could make a caricature of Approval itself. Perhaps something
about a calculator that just says "IDK, do the base conversion
yourself, I only accept input numbers in factoradic". But caricatures
only make people angry. Let's not stoop to them, shall we?
I’ll ask this for the 3^rd time:
…
How would like you to handount-audit a Condorcet count for a
many-candidate national presidential election?
I think your question assumes something that won't hold. If you have a
25-candidate presidential election, you've already lost, because
nobody is going to rank 25 candidates, irrespective of whether the
method is Condorcet, IRV, or Borda.
I'm not familiar with minor parties in the US. Has there ever been a
25-candidate presidential election?
I don't think I can comment beyond that: I don't know enough about
poll workers. I'll leave that to someone with experience. (Although
roughly calculating: suppose 6 candidates like in Burlington. That's
30 pairs. Five times the work if counting a particular preference is
as before. So you'd either need 5x the workers, or five times the
time, or some combination of the two.)
On an aside, though, I would say that I generally wouldn't want to get
computers anywhere near election counting. However, if you absolutely
have to have them, there are ways of making sure they don't cheat:
formal verification. You could also create special-purpose tools that
say, only turn ranks into matrices and nothing else: there's no reason
(apart from programmer convenience) why an election tool should be a
general purpose computer that you could hide all sorts of shenanigans in.
I’ve discussed that at length in previous posts, & it probably isn’t
necessary to again post about ways of choosing how to vote in Approval.
But, just summarize:It’s easy.Whichever of the various ways you
prefer to use, for choosing whom to approve, it’s easy.…& no, it
doesn’t require knowing your objectively-optimal vote.
I’ve many times pointed out that Approval’s Myerson-Weber equilibrium
is the voter-median.
i.e. Approval soon homes in on where the Condorcet-Winner is.
Not necessarily. See the following paper:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04216v2
According to the authors, under their model, if every voter follows a
particular thresholding rule, then iterative approval generally
arrives at the Condorcet winner (but not always). However, if voters
are left to choose any thresholding rule they want (as you propose),
then anything is possible. The arrangement might even elect a
Condorcet loser, and the outcome may be slow to converge or who wins
may depend on how many polls you hold.
I'm reminded of a quote about distributed algorithms that I read
somewhere: "It's really easy to design distributed algorithms that
suffer from deadlock, network floods or widely unpredictable and
bizarre oscillations". That's in the context of computer science -
deadlocks might not be applicable to election methods. But it does
justify a starting position of skepticisim when considering schemes
that offload more of the work to the voters by turning a one-shot
method into a dynamical system.
It seems to me that, in every one of EM’s polls, including the recent
one, Approval chose the CW.
Have we forgotten that?
I haven't, nor have I forgotten that Approval wasn't actually the poll
winner.
But let's take this reasoning at face value. I don't have the other
polls' ballot data available at the moment, so let's consider the
latest one and pick... say, Borda.
As one can see by going to
https://munsterhjelm.no/km/rbvote/calc.html, pasting in the data, and
clicking Borda, Ranked Pairs is also the Borda winner.
But I don't think I'm going to start advocating for Borda.
To not be accused of tu quoque, let me clarify the point. As
Burlington shows, an election method needs to handle the hard cases,
not just the easy ones, or there may be a considerable uproar when the
method is faced with a hard case and then stumbles. (In addition,
people trying to make sure a stumble doesn't happen may start to do
mass compromising, further entrenching two-party rule.)
So it's quite possible that our polls are easy cases. But like
FairVote claiming that IRV gets the Condorcet winner more than 90% of
the time, that doesn't by itself tell us much, because the failures
have such a strong impact.
I illustrate the example above by picking a method we know to be bad
(Borda being so extremely easy to fool with cloning and burial), and
showing that the poll result comes out right. If a bad method can get
a good result, then "getting a good result" is less useful than it
might appear at first glance.
-km
Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
info
Kristofer,
> I think your question assumes something that won't hold. If you have a
> 25-candidate presidential election, you've already lost, because
> nobody is going to rank 25 candidates, irrespective of whether the
> method is Condorcet, IRV, or Borda.
So what? Truncation should be allowed and so the voters will probably
just do that to a lot of the candidates. How is that a problem?
I should say that 25 candidates on the presidential ballot is more
likely to be a success than some sort of "failure" because it might mean
that ballot access has granted to serious candidates representing a wide
range of opinions.
Alternatively they could all be ego-tripping corporate clones and/or
unserious stooge candidates that are only running to help one of the
major candidates by attracting voters who might otherwise stay home and
then funnelling their preferences to that major candidate.
In 2003 there was California gubernatorial election with 135 candidates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_California_gubernatorial_recall_election#Results
Chris B.
On 26/05/2024 9:29 pm, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
> On 2024-05-26 07:28, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
>> Someone keeps repeating that the voters shouldn’t have to vote
>> strategically. He wants the method to do it all for us, after we
>> merely state our sincere-rankings.
>>
>> That’s of course a common attitude:
>>
>> …wanting a high-tech, computation-intensive,computer-dependent system
>> to do it all for us, taking all the actual choosing responsibility
>> off of us.…sheltering & isolating us from the choice.
>
> I would prefer that you do not attribute opinions that the proponents
> have not expressed. Nowhere have I said that Condorcet "[isolates] us
> from the choice" we make.
>
> What you call "sheltering" and "isolating", I see as the method taking
> proper responsibility - proper responsibility to turn the voters'
> unambiguous honest opinions into an outcome without dumping the
> algorithmic calculation upon te voter themselves. See my "kick the can
> down the road" post for more info.
>
> Now, I could make a caricature of Approval itself. Perhaps something
> about a calculator that just says "IDK, do the base conversion
> yourself, I only accept input numbers in factoradic". But caricatures
> only make people angry. Let's not stoop to them, shall we?
>
>> I’ll ask this for the 3^rd time:
>>
>> …
>>
>> How would like you to handount-audit a Condorcet count for a
>> many-candidate national presidential election?
>
> I think your question assumes something that won't hold. If you have a
> 25-candidate presidential election, you've already lost, because
> nobody is going to rank 25 candidates, irrespective of whether the
> method is Condorcet, IRV, or Borda.
>
> I'm not familiar with minor parties in the US. Has there ever been a
> 25-candidate presidential election?
>
> I don't think I can comment beyond that: I don't know enough about
> poll workers. I'll leave that to someone with experience. (Although
> roughly calculating: suppose 6 candidates like in Burlington. That's
> 30 pairs. Five times the work if counting a particular preference is
> as before. So you'd either need 5x the workers, or five times the
> time, or some combination of the two.)
>
> On an aside, though, I would say that I generally wouldn't want to get
> computers anywhere near election counting. However, if you absolutely
> have to have them, there are ways of making sure they don't cheat:
> formal verification. You could also create special-purpose tools that
> say, only turn ranks into matrices and nothing else: there's no reason
> (apart from programmer convenience) why an election tool should be a
> general purpose computer that you could hide all sorts of shenanigans in.
>
>> I’ve discussed that at length in previous posts, & it probably isn’t
>> necessary to again post about ways of choosing how to vote in Approval.
>>
>> But, just summarize:It’s easy.Whichever of the various ways you
>> prefer to use, for choosing whom to approve, it’s easy.…& no, it
>> doesn’t require knowing your objectively-optimal vote.
>
>>
>> I’ve many times pointed out that Approval’s Myerson-Weber equilibrium
>> is the voter-median.
>>
>> i.e. Approval soon homes in on where the Condorcet-Winner is.
>
> Not necessarily. See the following paper:
> https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04216v2
>
> According to the authors, under their model, if every voter follows a
> particular thresholding rule, then iterative approval generally
> arrives at the Condorcet winner (but not always). However, if voters
> are left to choose any thresholding rule they want (as you propose),
> then anything is possible. The arrangement might even elect a
> Condorcet loser, and the outcome may be slow to converge or who wins
> may depend on how many polls you hold.
>
> I'm reminded of a quote about distributed algorithms that I read
> somewhere: "It's really easy to design distributed algorithms that
> suffer from deadlock, network floods or widely unpredictable and
> bizarre oscillations". That's in the context of computer science -
> deadlocks might not be applicable to election methods. But it does
> justify a starting position of skepticisim when considering schemes
> that offload more of the work to the voters by turning a one-shot
> method into a dynamical system.
>
>> It seems to me that, in every one of EM’s polls, including the recent
>> one, Approval chose the CW.
>>
>> Have we forgotten that?
>
> I haven't, nor have I forgotten that Approval wasn't actually the poll
> winner.
>
> But let's take this reasoning at face value. I don't have the other
> polls' ballot data available at the moment, so let's consider the
> latest one and pick... say, Borda.
>
> As one can see by going to
> https://munsterhjelm.no/km/rbvote/calc.html, pasting in the data, and
> clicking Borda, Ranked Pairs is also the Borda winner.
>
> But I don't think I'm going to start advocating for Borda.
>
>
> To not be accused of tu quoque, let me clarify the point. As
> Burlington shows, an election method needs to handle the hard cases,
> not just the easy ones, or there may be a considerable uproar when the
> method is faced with a hard case and then stumbles. (In addition,
> people trying to make sure a stumble doesn't happen may start to do
> mass compromising, further entrenching two-party rule.)
>
> So it's quite possible that our polls are easy cases. But like
> FairVote claiming that IRV gets the Condorcet winner more than 90% of
> the time, that doesn't by itself tell us much, because the failures
> have such a strong impact.
>
> I illustrate the example above by picking a method we know to be bad
> (Borda being so extremely easy to fool with cloning and burial), and
> showing that the poll result comes out right. If a bad method can get
> a good result, then "getting a good result" is less useful than it
> might appear at first glance.
>
> -km
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
> info
MO
Michael Ossipoff
Sun, May 26, 2024 8:08 PM
On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 04:59 Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
On 2024-05-26 07:28, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
Someone keeps repeating that the voters shouldn’t have to vote
strategically. He wants the method to do it all for us, after we
state our sincere-rankings.
That’s of course a common attitude:
…wanting a high-tech, computation-intensive,computer-dependent
do it all for us, taking all the actual choosing responsibility off
us.…sheltering & isolating us from the choice.
I would prefer that you do not attribute opinions that the proponents
have not expressed. Nowhere have I said…
Whoa. I didn’t mention you. I said only “someone”. I wasn’t referring to
Actually, I thought you were referring to me.
Anyway, let's give Kristofer a break that he is seeking.
But that doesn't mean that I will engage you in his absence. As I told
Kristofer, I sometimes have to budget my physical, mental, and emotional
energy.
Suit yourself. I chose to comment on things you said. I didn’t do so in
order to get a reply from you.
This forum, like most, in its rules of conduct, asks that we not keep
repeating an already-answered claim without answering the objections to it.
That’s a basic standard for discussion. It’s the difference between
discussion & bigoted assertion.
You see, the difference is that I answered what you said, where you just
make like a public sound-system set on endless repeat.
But having answered what you said, I’ve said what I meant to, in regards to
those comments.
…&, having done so, & with no need to answer you again, there’s also no
need to have your postings displayed. So I’m going to again set them to be
rerouted to Trash.
On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 12:39 robert bristow-johnson <
rbj@audioimagination.com> wrote:
>
>
> > On 05/26/2024 3:25 PM EDT Michael Ossipoff <email9648742@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 04:59 Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
> km_elmet@t-online.de> wrote:
> > > On 2024-05-26 07:28, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
> > > > Someone keeps repeating that the voters shouldn’t have to vote
> > > > strategically. He wants the method to do it all for us, after we
> merely
> > > > state our sincere-rankings.
> > > >
> > > > That’s of course a common attitude:
> > > >
> > > > …wanting a high-tech, computation-intensive,computer-dependent
> system to
> > > > do it all for us, taking all the actual choosing responsibility off
> of
> > > > us.…sheltering & isolating us from the choice.
> > >
> > > I would prefer that you do not attribute opinions that the proponents
> > > have not expressed. Nowhere have I said…
> >
> > Whoa. I didn’t mention you. I said only “someone”. I wasn’t referring to
> you.
> >
>
> Actually, I thought you were referring to me.
>
> Anyway, let's give Kristofer a break that he is seeking.
>
> But that doesn't mean that I will engage you in his absence. As I told
> Kristofer, I sometimes have to budget my physical, mental, and emotional
> energy.
Suit yourself. I chose to comment on things you said. I didn’t do so in
order to get a reply from you.
This forum, like most, in its rules of conduct, asks that we not keep
repeating an already-answered claim without answering the objections to it.
That’s a basic standard for discussion. It’s the difference between
discussion & bigoted assertion.
You see, the difference is that I answered what you said, where you just
make like a public sound-system set on endless repeat.
But having answered what you said, I’ve said what I meant to, in regards to
those comments.
…&, having done so, & with no need to answer you again, there’s also no
need to have your postings displayed. So I’m going to again set them to be
rerouted to Trash.
>
> --
>
> r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj@audioimagination.com
>
> "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
>
> .
> .
> .
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
> info
>
RL
Rob Lanphier
Sun, May 26, 2024 10:47 PM
Hi Michael,
I pretty much agree with your positions vis a vis Condorcet and approval.
I came around from mildly negative regarding approval in the 1990s and
2000s, to neutral in the early 2010s to very positive about it in the late
2010s and now. You're right that the auditability of approval elections is
a killer feature, and that auditing any strictly Condorcet-winner-criterion
compliant system will be incredibly difficult.
I think, though, that engaging in good faith on this mailing list is going
to involve taking the time to make your responses shorter and to the
point. I frequently find it difficult-to-impossible to read your poorly
formatted, long, and disjointed responses. I feel a little bad for calling
you out specifically on this, because you aren't the only one I could level
that criticism toward, but I'm hoping everyone who is reading this isn't
too smug about THEIR emails being crisp and to-the-point. Writing a good
postcard is often a lot more work than writing a long letter, and we all
could probably do better. Can we all work on making our missives to this
mailing list a little clearer?
Rob
On Sat, May 25, 2024 at 10:29 PM Michael Ossipoff email9648742@gmail.com
wrote:
Someone keeps repeating that the voters shouldn’t have to vote
strategically. He wants the method to do it all for us, after we merely
state our sincere-rankings.
…
That’s of course a common attitude:
…
…wanting a high-tech, computation-intensive, computer-dependent system
to do it all for us, taking all the actual choosing responsibility off of
us. …sheltering & isolating us from the choice.
…
I’ve already agreed that a completely legalistic system like a good
Condorcet method is probably the best thing for the inimical electorate in
our public-political elections.
…
...all else being equal (as KM said).
…
I pointed out that all is NOT equal. As desirable as it would be for our
inimical public-political elections, the automatic machine that does it all
for us, to isolate & shelter us from the choosing, comes at too high a
price in our public-political elections.
…
Condorcet for public political elections has a number of problems, with
count-security as the main & most serious problem. I spoke of that before,
but it just didn’t seem to get across. Hello?
…
Is it that we don’t believe that count-fraud is a genuine problem…or is it
just, so strongly do we want to believe what we believe, that we’ve
convinced ourselves that we didn’t hear?
…
Claims that Condorcet is transparent consisted of handwaving that
disregarded the fact that Condorcet requires many, many times more
computation than does Approval. …& requires many, many times more count
totals be tallied, stored, & transmitted to central-counting.
…
…a humungously, prohibitively, bigger & more computation-intensive count.
…
I’ll ask this for the 3rd time:
…
How would like you to handount-audit a Condorcet count for a
many-candidate national presidential election?
…
As for the belief (if such a belief is what this is about) that
count-fraud isn’t a problem, I’ll repeat this;
…
Look up the issues of Harper’s Magazine that came out after each of G.W.
Bushes two elections (2000 & 2004). Mountains of evidence for widespread
count-fraud. Check out the two Harpers articles.
…
One; thing they mentioned was that a supplier of voting-machines promised
to “deliver” the election to Dubya. One of the two Harper’s articles will
give you details about that.
…
It would be much better to trust the voters to use Approval well, than to
trust all of the count-personnel to not perpetrate count-fraud in the
elaborate computation-intensive Condorcet count.
…
There might be a desire to have it all done for us by a computer, but that
comes at too high a price.
…
…& that’s not counting Approval’s other advantages, including incomparably
less expensive & easier explanation, definition, proposal, enactment, &
administration…in addition to the much better count-security that I spoke
of above.
…
How bad, in your perception, is it for voters to have to make the choice
for themselves instead of just telling their preferences & having it done
for us? The Appoval-opponent I spoke of keeps saying that he wouldn’t
know whether to approve a maybe but maybe-not needed 2nd-choice. A
dilemma: Risk someone worse than him winning, or risk helping him beat your
favorite? That critic complains that that’s unacceptable.
…
Yes, with any method other than the wv Condorcet methods, you don’t know
what your objectively optimal vote is. Neither do any of the other
voters, so don’t worry about it !!
…
That critic seems to believe that it’s necessary to know your
objectively-optimal vote.
…
That’s a misbelief.
…
As I’ve said, probability & therefore expectation & its maximization
depend of what information you have & are using.
…
No, you can’t know your objectively-optimal vote.
…
But you can vote to maximize your expectation, based on the information
that you have & are using.
…
I’ve discussed that at length in previous posts, & it probably isn’t
necessary to again post about ways of choosing how to vote in Approval.
…
But, just summarize: It’s easy. Whichever of the various ways you
prefer to use, for choosing whom to approve, it’s easy. …& no, it
doesn’t require knowing your objectively-optimal vote.
…
Some of us have been so spoiled by what wv Condorcet can achieve, in doing
it all for us, with us only needing to express our sincere
preference-ordering, that we’ve come to believe that that’s necessary. …having
it all done for us, to shelter & isolate us from the choice.
…
I’ve many times pointed out that Approval’s Myerson-Weber equilibrium is
the voter-median.
…
i.e. Approval soon homes in on where the Condorcet-Winner is.
…
Have we forgotten that?
…
It seems to me that, in every one of EM’s polls, including the recent one,
Approval chose the CW.
…
Have we forgotten that?
…
The simple, reliable handtool works just fine.
…
I should add that I like wv Condorcet (RP(wv) & MinMax(wv) ) for polls,
because of course they look at more information.
…
…& I’d like them for public-political elections too, were it not for the
abovestated problems of the rank-methods.
Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
info
Hi Michael,
I pretty much agree with your positions vis a vis Condorcet and approval.
I came around from mildly negative regarding approval in the 1990s and
2000s, to neutral in the early 2010s to very positive about it in the late
2010s and now. You're right that the auditability of approval elections is
a killer feature, and that auditing any strictly Condorcet-winner-criterion
compliant system will be incredibly difficult.
I think, though, that engaging in good faith on this mailing list is going
to involve taking the time to make your responses shorter and to the
point. I frequently find it difficult-to-impossible to read your poorly
formatted, long, and disjointed responses. I feel a little bad for calling
you out specifically on this, because you aren't the only one I could level
that criticism toward, but I'm hoping everyone who is reading this isn't
too smug about THEIR emails being crisp and to-the-point. Writing a good
postcard is often a lot more work than writing a long letter, and we all
could probably do better. Can we all work on making our missives to this
mailing list a little clearer?
Rob
On Sat, May 25, 2024 at 10:29 PM Michael Ossipoff <email9648742@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Someone keeps repeating that the voters shouldn’t have to vote
> strategically. He wants the method to do it all for us, after we merely
> state our sincere-rankings.
>
> …
>
> That’s of course a common attitude:
>
> …
>
> …wanting a high-tech, computation-intensive, computer-dependent system
> to do it all for us, taking all the actual choosing responsibility off of
> us. …sheltering & isolating us from the choice.
>
> …
>
> I’ve already agreed that a completely legalistic system like a good
> Condorcet method is probably the best thing for the inimical electorate in
> our public-political elections.
>
> …
>
> ...all else being equal (as KM said).
>
> …
>
> I pointed out that all is NOT equal. As desirable as it would be for our
> inimical public-political elections, the automatic machine that does it all
> for us, to isolate & shelter us from the choosing, comes at too high a
> price in our public-political elections.
>
> …
>
> Condorcet for public political elections has a number of problems, with
> count-security as the main & most serious problem. I spoke of that before,
> but it just didn’t seem to get across. Hello?
>
> …
>
> Is it that we don’t believe that count-fraud is a genuine problem…or is it
> just, so strongly do we want to believe what we believe, that we’ve
> convinced ourselves that we didn’t hear?
>
> …
>
> Claims that Condorcet is transparent consisted of handwaving that
> disregarded the fact that Condorcet requires many, many times more
> computation than does Approval. …& requires many, many times more count
> totals be tallied, stored, & transmitted to central-counting.
>
> …
>
> …a humungously, prohibitively, bigger & more computation-intensive count.
>
> …
>
> I’ll ask this for the 3rd time:
>
> …
>
> How would like you to handount-audit a Condorcet count for a
> many-candidate national presidential election?
>
> …
>
> As for the belief (if such a belief is what this is about) that
> count-fraud isn’t a problem, I’ll repeat this;
>
> …
>
> Look up the issues of Harper’s Magazine that came out after each of G.W.
> Bushes two elections (2000 & 2004). Mountains of evidence for widespread
> count-fraud. Check out the two Harpers articles.
>
> …
>
> One; thing they mentioned was that a supplier of voting-machines promised
> to “deliver” the election to Dubya. One of the two Harper’s articles will
> give you details about that.
>
> …
>
> It would be much better to trust the voters to use Approval well, than to
> trust all of the count-personnel to not perpetrate count-fraud in the
> elaborate computation-intensive Condorcet count.
>
> …
>
> There might be a desire to have it all done for us by a computer, but that
> comes at too high a price.
>
> …
>
> …& that’s not counting Approval’s other advantages, including incomparably
> less expensive & easier explanation, definition, proposal, enactment, &
> administration…in addition to the much better count-security that I spoke
> of above.
>
> …
>
> How bad, in your perception, is it for voters to have to make the choice
> for themselves instead of just telling their preferences & having it done
> for us? The Appoval-opponent I spoke of keeps saying that he wouldn’t
> know whether to approve a maybe but maybe-not needed 2nd-choice. A
> dilemma: Risk someone worse than him winning, or risk helping him beat your
> favorite? That critic complains that that’s unacceptable.
>
> …
>
> Yes, with any method other than the wv Condorcet methods, you don’t know
> what your objectively optimal vote is. Neither do any of the other
> voters, so don’t worry about it !!
>
> …
>
> That critic seems to believe that it’s necessary to know your
> objectively-optimal vote.
>
> …
>
> That’s a misbelief.
>
> …
>
> As I’ve said, probability & therefore expectation & its maximization
> depend of what information you have & are using.
>
> …
>
> No, you can’t know your objectively-optimal vote.
>
> …
>
> But you can vote to maximize your expectation, based on the information
> that you have & are using.
>
> …
>
> I’ve discussed that at length in previous posts, & it probably isn’t
> necessary to again post about ways of choosing how to vote in Approval.
>
> …
>
> But, just summarize: It’s easy. Whichever of the various ways you
> prefer to use, for choosing whom to approve, it’s easy. …& no, it
> doesn’t require knowing your objectively-optimal vote.
>
> …
>
> Some of us have been so spoiled by what wv Condorcet can achieve, in doing
> it all for us, with us only needing to express our sincere
> preference-ordering, that we’ve come to believe that that’s necessary. …having
> it all done for us, to shelter & isolate us from the choice.
>
> …
>
> I’ve many times pointed out that Approval’s Myerson-Weber equilibrium is
> the voter-median.
>
> …
>
> i.e. Approval soon homes in on where the Condorcet-Winner is.
>
> …
>
> Have we forgotten that?
>
> …
>
> It seems to me that, in every one of EM’s polls, including the recent one,
> Approval chose the CW.
>
> …
>
> Have we forgotten that?
>
> …
>
> The simple, reliable handtool works just fine.
>
> …
>
> I should add that I like wv Condorcet (RP(wv) & MinMax(wv) ) for polls,
> because of course they look at more information.
>
> …
>
> …& I’d like them for public-political elections too, were it not for the
> abovestated problems of the rank-methods.
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
> info
>
MO
Michael Ossipoff
Mon, May 27, 2024 4:05 AM
It’s good to hear that you agree about Approval. Not a lot of people here
do.
RCV has people wanting rankings, & missing how much improvement comes with
even the absolute minimal way to express & have counted preference & merit
comparison among the candidate-set.
On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 15:47 Rob Lanphier roblan@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Michael,
I pretty much agree with your positions vis a vis Condorcet and approval.
I came around from mildly negative regarding approval in the 1990s and
2000s, to neutral in the early 2010s to very positive about it in the late
2010s and now. You're right that the auditability of approval elections is
a killer feature, and that auditing any strictly Condorcet-winner-criterion
compliant system will be incredibly difficult.
I think, though, that engaging in good faith on this mailing list is going
to involve taking the time to make your responses shorter and to the
point. I frequently find it difficult-to-impossible to read your poorly
formatted, long, and disjointed responses. I feel a little bad for calling
you out specifically on this, because you aren't the only one I could level
that criticism toward, but I'm hoping everyone who is reading this isn't
too smug about THEIR emails being crisp and to-the-point. Writing a good
postcard is often a lot more work than writing a long letter, and we all
could probably do better. Can we all work on making our missives to this
mailing list a little clearer?
Rob
On Sat, May 25, 2024 at 10:29 PM Michael Ossipoff email9648742@gmail.com
wrote:
Someone keeps repeating that the voters shouldn’t have to vote
strategically. He wants the method to do it all for us, after we merely
state our sincere-rankings.
…
That’s of course a common attitude:
…
…wanting a high-tech, computation-intensive, computer-dependent system
to do it all for us, taking all the actual choosing responsibility off of
us. …sheltering & isolating us from the choice.
…
I’ve already agreed that a completely legalistic system like a good
Condorcet method is probably the best thing for the inimical electorate in
our public-political elections.
…
...all else being equal (as KM said).
…
I pointed out that all is NOT equal. As desirable as it would be for our
inimical public-political elections, the automatic machine that does it all
for us, to isolate & shelter us from the choosing, comes at too high a
price in our public-political elections.
…
Condorcet for public political elections has a number of problems, with
count-security as the main & most serious problem. I spoke of that before,
but it just didn’t seem to get across. Hello?
…
Is it that we don’t believe that count-fraud is a genuine problem…or is
it just, so strongly do we want to believe what we believe, that we’ve
convinced ourselves that we didn’t hear?
…
Claims that Condorcet is transparent consisted of handwaving that
disregarded the fact that Condorcet requires many, many times more
computation than does Approval. …& requires many, many times more
count totals be tallied, stored, & transmitted to central-counting.
…
…a humungously, prohibitively, bigger & more computation-intensive count.
…
I’ll ask this for the 3rd time:
…
How would like you to handount-audit a Condorcet count for a
many-candidate national presidential election?
…
As for the belief (if such a belief is what this is about) that
count-fraud isn’t a problem, I’ll repeat this;
…
Look up the issues of Harper’s Magazine that came out after each of G.W.
Bushes two elections (2000 & 2004). Mountains of evidence for
widespread count-fraud. Check out the two Harpers articles.
…
One; thing they mentioned was that a supplier of voting-machines promised
to “deliver” the election to Dubya. One of the two Harper’s articles will
give you details about that.
…
It would be much better to trust the voters to use Approval well, than to
trust all of the count-personnel to not perpetrate count-fraud in the
elaborate computation-intensive Condorcet count.
…
There might be a desire to have it all done for us by a computer, but
that comes at too high a price.
…
…& that’s not counting Approval’s other advantages, including
incomparably less expensive & easier explanation, definition, proposal,
enactment, & administration…in addition to the much better
count-security that I spoke of above.
…
How bad, in your perception, is it for voters to have to make the choice
for themselves instead of just telling their preferences & having it done
for us? The Appoval-opponent I spoke of keeps saying that he wouldn’t
know whether to approve a maybe but maybe-not needed 2nd-choice. A
dilemma: Risk someone worse than him winning, or risk helping him beat your
favorite? That critic complains that that’s unacceptable.
…
Yes, with any method other than the wv Condorcet methods, you don’t know
what your objectively optimal vote is. Neither do any of the other
voters, so don’t worry about it !!
…
That critic seems to believe that it’s necessary to know your
objectively-optimal vote.
…
That’s a misbelief.
…
As I’ve said, probability & therefore expectation & its maximization
depend of what information you have & are using.
…
No, you can’t know your objectively-optimal vote.
…
But you can vote to maximize your expectation, based on the information
that you have & are using.
…
I’ve discussed that at length in previous posts, & it probably isn’t
necessary to again post about ways of choosing how to vote in Approval.
…
But, just summarize: It’s easy. Whichever of the various ways you
prefer to use, for choosing whom to approve, it’s easy. …& no, it
doesn’t require knowing your objectively-optimal vote.
…
Some of us have been so spoiled by what wv Condorcet can achieve, in
doing it all for us, with us only needing to express our sincere
preference-ordering, that we’ve come to believe that that’s necessary. …having
it all done for us, to shelter & isolate us from the choice.
…
I’ve many times pointed out that Approval’s Myerson-Weber equilibrium is
the voter-median.
…
i.e. Approval soon homes in on where the Condorcet-Winner is.
…
Have we forgotten that?
…
It seems to me that, in every one of EM’s polls, including the recent
one, Approval chose the CW.
…
Have we forgotten that?
…
The simple, reliable handtool works just fine.
…
I should add that I like wv Condorcet (RP(wv) & MinMax(wv) ) for polls,
because of course they look at more information.
…
…& I’d like them for public-political elections too, were it not for the
abovestated problems of the rank-methods.
It’s good to hear that you agree about Approval. Not a lot of people here
do.
RCV has people wanting rankings, & missing how much improvement comes with
even the absolute minimal way to express & have counted preference & merit
comparison among the candidate-set.
On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 15:47 Rob Lanphier <roblan@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Michael,
>
> I pretty much agree with your positions vis a vis Condorcet and approval.
> I came around from mildly negative regarding approval in the 1990s and
> 2000s, to neutral in the early 2010s to very positive about it in the late
> 2010s and now. You're right that the auditability of approval elections is
> a killer feature, and that auditing any strictly Condorcet-winner-criterion
> compliant system will be incredibly difficult.
>
> I think, though, that engaging in good faith on this mailing list is going
> to involve taking the time to make your responses shorter and to the
> point. I frequently find it difficult-to-impossible to read your poorly
> formatted, long, and disjointed responses. I feel a little bad for calling
> you out specifically on this, because you aren't the only one I could level
> that criticism toward, but I'm hoping everyone who is reading this isn't
> too smug about THEIR emails being crisp and to-the-point. Writing a good
> postcard is often a lot more work than writing a long letter, and we all
> could probably do better. Can we all work on making our missives to this
> mailing list a little clearer?
>
> Rob
>
>
> On Sat, May 25, 2024 at 10:29 PM Michael Ossipoff <email9648742@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Someone keeps repeating that the voters shouldn’t have to vote
>> strategically. He wants the method to do it all for us, after we merely
>> state our sincere-rankings.
>>
>> …
>>
>> That’s of course a common attitude:
>>
>> …
>>
>> …wanting a high-tech, computation-intensive, computer-dependent system
>> to do it all for us, taking all the actual choosing responsibility off of
>> us. …sheltering & isolating us from the choice.
>>
>> …
>>
>> I’ve already agreed that a completely legalistic system like a good
>> Condorcet method is probably the best thing for the inimical electorate in
>> our public-political elections.
>>
>> …
>>
>> ...all else being equal (as KM said).
>>
>> …
>>
>> I pointed out that all is NOT equal. As desirable as it would be for our
>> inimical public-political elections, the automatic machine that does it all
>> for us, to isolate & shelter us from the choosing, comes at too high a
>> price in our public-political elections.
>>
>> …
>>
>> Condorcet for public political elections has a number of problems, with
>> count-security as the main & most serious problem. I spoke of that before,
>> but it just didn’t seem to get across. Hello?
>>
>> …
>>
>> Is it that we don’t believe that count-fraud is a genuine problem…or is
>> it just, so strongly do we want to believe what we believe, that we’ve
>> convinced ourselves that we didn’t hear?
>>
>> …
>>
>> Claims that Condorcet is transparent consisted of handwaving that
>> disregarded the fact that Condorcet requires many, many times more
>> computation than does Approval. …& requires many, many times more
>> count totals be tallied, stored, & transmitted to central-counting.
>>
>> …
>>
>> …a humungously, prohibitively, bigger & more computation-intensive count.
>>
>> …
>>
>> I’ll ask this for the 3rd time:
>>
>> …
>>
>> How would like you to handount-audit a Condorcet count for a
>> many-candidate national presidential election?
>>
>> …
>>
>> As for the belief (if such a belief is what this is about) that
>> count-fraud isn’t a problem, I’ll repeat this;
>>
>> …
>>
>> Look up the issues of Harper’s Magazine that came out after each of G.W.
>> Bushes two elections (2000 & 2004). Mountains of evidence for
>> widespread count-fraud. Check out the two Harpers articles.
>>
>> …
>>
>> One; thing they mentioned was that a supplier of voting-machines promised
>> to “deliver” the election to Dubya. One of the two Harper’s articles will
>> give you details about that.
>>
>> …
>>
>> It would be much better to trust the voters to use Approval well, than to
>> trust all of the count-personnel to not perpetrate count-fraud in the
>> elaborate computation-intensive Condorcet count.
>>
>> …
>>
>> There might be a desire to have it all done for us by a computer, but
>> that comes at too high a price.
>>
>> …
>>
>> …& that’s not counting Approval’s other advantages, including
>> incomparably less expensive & easier explanation, definition, proposal,
>> enactment, & administration…in addition to the much better
>> count-security that I spoke of above.
>>
>> …
>>
>> How bad, in your perception, is it for voters to have to make the choice
>> for themselves instead of just telling their preferences & having it done
>> for us? The Appoval-opponent I spoke of keeps saying that he wouldn’t
>> know whether to approve a maybe but maybe-not needed 2nd-choice. A
>> dilemma: Risk someone worse than him winning, or risk helping him beat your
>> favorite? That critic complains that that’s unacceptable.
>>
>> …
>>
>> Yes, with any method other than the wv Condorcet methods, you don’t know
>> what your objectively optimal vote is. Neither do any of the other
>> voters, so don’t worry about it !!
>>
>> …
>>
>> That critic seems to believe that it’s necessary to know your
>> objectively-optimal vote.
>>
>> …
>>
>> That’s a misbelief.
>>
>> …
>>
>> As I’ve said, probability & therefore expectation & its maximization
>> depend of what information you have & are using.
>>
>> …
>>
>> No, you can’t know your objectively-optimal vote.
>>
>> …
>>
>> But you can vote to maximize your expectation, based on the information
>> that you have & are using.
>>
>> …
>>
>> I’ve discussed that at length in previous posts, & it probably isn’t
>> necessary to again post about ways of choosing how to vote in Approval.
>>
>> …
>>
>> But, just summarize: It’s easy. Whichever of the various ways you
>> prefer to use, for choosing whom to approve, it’s easy. …& no, it
>> doesn’t require knowing your objectively-optimal vote.
>>
>> …
>>
>> Some of us have been so spoiled by what wv Condorcet can achieve, in
>> doing it all for us, with us only needing to express our sincere
>> preference-ordering, that we’ve come to believe that that’s necessary. …having
>> it all done for us, to shelter & isolate us from the choice.
>>
>> …
>>
>> I’ve many times pointed out that Approval’s Myerson-Weber equilibrium is
>> the voter-median.
>>
>> …
>>
>> i.e. Approval soon homes in on where the Condorcet-Winner is.
>>
>> …
>>
>> Have we forgotten that?
>>
>> …
>>
>> It seems to me that, in every one of EM’s polls, including the recent
>> one, Approval chose the CW.
>>
>> …
>>
>> Have we forgotten that?
>>
>> …
>>
>> The simple, reliable handtool works just fine.
>>
>> …
>>
>> I should add that I like wv Condorcet (RP(wv) & MinMax(wv) ) for polls,
>> because of course they look at more information.
>>
>> …
>>
>> …& I’d like them for public-political elections too, were it not for the
>> abovestated problems of the rank-methods.
>>
> ----
>
>
>> Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
>> info
>>
>
MO
Michael Ossipoff
Mon, May 27, 2024 5:03 AM
In 2003 there was California gubernatorial election with 135 candidates.
That’s 18090 pairwise vote-totals to determine at each precinct from the
rankings, by examining each ranking to determine which member of each
possible candidate-pair is ranked over the other on that ballot.
…& 18080 pairwise vote-totals for the precincts to sum, store, & transmit
or carry to the central count location.
…& verify in an audit.
On 2024-05-26 07:28, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
Someone keeps repeating that the voters shouldn’t have to vote
strategically. He wants the method to do it all for us, after we
merely state our sincere-rankings.
That’s of course a common attitude:
…wanting a high-tech, computation-intensive,computer-dependent system
to do it all for us, taking all the actual choosing responsibility
off of us.…sheltering & isolating us from the choice.
I would prefer that you do not attribute opinions that the proponents
have not expressed. Nowhere have I said that Condorcet "[isolates] us
from the choice" we make.
What you call "sheltering" and "isolating", I see as the method taking
proper responsibility - proper responsibility to turn the voters'
unambiguous honest opinions into an outcome without dumping the
algorithmic calculation upon te voter themselves. See my "kick the can
down the road" post for more info.
Now, I could make a caricature of Approval itself. Perhaps something
about a calculator that just says "IDK, do the base conversion
yourself, I only accept input numbers in factoradic". But caricatures
only make people angry. Let's not stoop to them, shall we?
I’ll ask this for the 3^rd time:
…
How would like you to handount-audit a Condorcet count for a
many-candidate national presidential election?
I think your question assumes something that won't hold. If you have a
25-candidate presidential election, you've already lost, because
nobody is going to rank 25 candidates, irrespective of whether the
method is Condorcet, IRV, or Borda.
I'm not familiar with minor parties in the US. Has there ever been a
25-candidate presidential election?
I don't think I can comment beyond that: I don't know enough about
poll workers. I'll leave that to someone with experience. (Although
roughly calculating: suppose 6 candidates like in Burlington. That's
30 pairs. Five times the work if counting a particular preference is
as before. So you'd either need 5x the workers, or five times the
time, or some combination of the two.)
On an aside, though, I would say that I generally wouldn't want to get
computers anywhere near election counting. However, if you absolutely
have to have them, there are ways of making sure they don't cheat:
formal verification. You could also create special-purpose tools that
say, only turn ranks into matrices and nothing else: there's no reason
(apart from programmer convenience) why an election tool should be a
general purpose computer that you could hide all sorts of shenanigans in.
I’ve discussed that at length in previous posts, & it probably isn’t
necessary to again post about ways of choosing how to vote in Approval.
But, just summarize:It’s easy.Whichever of the various ways you
prefer to use, for choosing whom to approve, it’s easy.…& no, it
doesn’t require knowing your objectively-optimal vote.
I’ve many times pointed out that Approval’s Myerson-Weber equilibrium
is the voter-median.
i.e. Approval soon homes in on where the Condorcet-Winner is.
Not necessarily. See the following paper:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04216v2
According to the authors, under their model, if every voter follows a
particular thresholding rule, then iterative approval generally
arrives at the Condorcet winner (but not always). However, if voters
are left to choose any thresholding rule they want (as you propose),
then anything is possible. The arrangement might even elect a
Condorcet loser, and the outcome may be slow to converge or who wins
may depend on how many polls you hold.
I'm reminded of a quote about distributed algorithms that I read
somewhere: "It's really easy to design distributed algorithms that
suffer from deadlock, network floods or widely unpredictable and
bizarre oscillations". That's in the context of computer science -
deadlocks might not be applicable to election methods. But it does
justify a starting position of skepticisim when considering schemes
that offload more of the work to the voters by turning a one-shot
method into a dynamical system.
It seems to me that, in every one of EM’s polls, including the recent
one, Approval chose the CW.
Have we forgotten that?
I haven't, nor have I forgotten that Approval wasn't actually the poll
winner.
But let's take this reasoning at face value. I don't have the other
polls' ballot data available at the moment, so let's consider the
latest one and pick... say, Borda.
As one can see by going to
https://munsterhjelm.no/km/rbvote/calc.html, pasting in the data, and
clicking Borda, Ranked Pairs is also the Borda winner.
But I don't think I'm going to start advocating for Borda.
To not be accused of tu quoque, let me clarify the point. As
Burlington shows, an election method needs to handle the hard cases,
not just the easy ones, or there may be a considerable uproar when the
method is faced with a hard case and then stumbles. (In addition,
people trying to make sure a stumble doesn't happen may start to do
mass compromising, further entrenching two-party rule.)
So it's quite possible that our polls are easy cases. But like
FairVote claiming that IRV gets the Condorcet winner more than 90% of
the time, that doesn't by itself tell us much, because the failures
have such a strong impact.
I illustrate the example above by picking a method we know to be bad
(Borda being so extremely easy to fool with cloning and burial), and
showing that the poll result comes out right. If a bad method can get
a good result, then "getting a good result" is less useful than it
might appear at first glance.
-km
Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
info
On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 12:56 Chris Benham <cbenhamau@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>
> In 2003 there was California gubernatorial election with 135 candidates.
That’s 18090 pairwise vote-totals to determine at each precinct from the
rankings, by examining each ranking to determine which member of each
possible candidate-pair is ranked over the other on that ballot.
…& 18080 pairwise vote-totals for the precincts to sum, store, & transmit
or carry to the central count location.
…& verify in an audit.
>
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_California_gubernatorial_recall_election#Results
>
> Chris B.
>
> On 26/05/2024 9:29 pm, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
> > On 2024-05-26 07:28, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
> >> Someone keeps repeating that the voters shouldn’t have to vote
> >> strategically. He wants the method to do it all for us, after we
> >> merely state our sincere-rankings.
> >>
> >> That’s of course a common attitude:
> >>
> >> …wanting a high-tech, computation-intensive,computer-dependent system
> >> to do it all for us, taking all the actual choosing responsibility
> >> off of us.…sheltering & isolating us from the choice.
> >
> > I would prefer that you do not attribute opinions that the proponents
> > have not expressed. Nowhere have I said that Condorcet "[isolates] us
> > from the choice" we make.
> >
> > What you call "sheltering" and "isolating", I see as the method taking
> > proper responsibility - proper responsibility to turn the voters'
> > unambiguous honest opinions into an outcome without dumping the
> > algorithmic calculation upon te voter themselves. See my "kick the can
> > down the road" post for more info.
> >
> > Now, I could make a caricature of Approval itself. Perhaps something
> > about a calculator that just says "IDK, do the base conversion
> > yourself, I only accept input numbers in factoradic". But caricatures
> > only make people angry. Let's not stoop to them, shall we?
> >
> >> I’ll ask this for the 3^rd time:
> >>
> >> …
> >>
> >> How would like you to handount-audit a Condorcet count for a
> >> many-candidate national presidential election?
> >
> > I think your question assumes something that won't hold. If you have a
> > 25-candidate presidential election, you've already lost, because
> > nobody is going to rank 25 candidates, irrespective of whether the
> > method is Condorcet, IRV, or Borda.
> >
> > I'm not familiar with minor parties in the US. Has there ever been a
> > 25-candidate presidential election?
> >
> > I don't think I can comment beyond that: I don't know enough about
> > poll workers. I'll leave that to someone with experience. (Although
> > roughly calculating: suppose 6 candidates like in Burlington. That's
> > 30 pairs. Five times the work if counting a particular preference is
> > as before. So you'd either need 5x the workers, or five times the
> > time, or some combination of the two.)
> >
> > On an aside, though, I would say that I generally wouldn't want to get
> > computers anywhere near election counting. However, if you absolutely
> > have to have them, there are ways of making sure they don't cheat:
> > formal verification. You could also create special-purpose tools that
> > say, only turn ranks into matrices and nothing else: there's no reason
> > (apart from programmer convenience) why an election tool should be a
> > general purpose computer that you could hide all sorts of shenanigans in.
> >
> >> I’ve discussed that at length in previous posts, & it probably isn’t
> >> necessary to again post about ways of choosing how to vote in Approval.
> >>
> >> But, just summarize:It’s easy.Whichever of the various ways you
> >> prefer to use, for choosing whom to approve, it’s easy.…& no, it
> >> doesn’t require knowing your objectively-optimal vote.
> >
> >>
> >> I’ve many times pointed out that Approval’s Myerson-Weber equilibrium
> >> is the voter-median.
> >>
> >> i.e. Approval soon homes in on where the Condorcet-Winner is.
> >
> > Not necessarily. See the following paper:
> > https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04216v2
> >
> > According to the authors, under their model, if every voter follows a
> > particular thresholding rule, then iterative approval generally
> > arrives at the Condorcet winner (but not always). However, if voters
> > are left to choose any thresholding rule they want (as you propose),
> > then anything is possible. The arrangement might even elect a
> > Condorcet loser, and the outcome may be slow to converge or who wins
> > may depend on how many polls you hold.
> >
> > I'm reminded of a quote about distributed algorithms that I read
> > somewhere: "It's really easy to design distributed algorithms that
> > suffer from deadlock, network floods or widely unpredictable and
> > bizarre oscillations". That's in the context of computer science -
> > deadlocks might not be applicable to election methods. But it does
> > justify a starting position of skepticisim when considering schemes
> > that offload more of the work to the voters by turning a one-shot
> > method into a dynamical system.
> >
> >> It seems to me that, in every one of EM’s polls, including the recent
> >> one, Approval chose the CW.
> >>
> >> Have we forgotten that?
> >
> > I haven't, nor have I forgotten that Approval wasn't actually the poll
> > winner.
> >
> > But let's take this reasoning at face value. I don't have the other
> > polls' ballot data available at the moment, so let's consider the
> > latest one and pick... say, Borda.
> >
> > As one can see by going to
> > https://munsterhjelm.no/km/rbvote/calc.html, pasting in the data, and
> > clicking Borda, Ranked Pairs is also the Borda winner.
> >
> > But I don't think I'm going to start advocating for Borda.
> >
> >
> > To not be accused of tu quoque, let me clarify the point. As
> > Burlington shows, an election method needs to handle the hard cases,
> > not just the easy ones, or there may be a considerable uproar when the
> > method is faced with a hard case and then stumbles. (In addition,
> > people trying to make sure a stumble doesn't happen may start to do
> > mass compromising, further entrenching two-party rule.)
> >
> > So it's quite possible that our polls are easy cases. But like
> > FairVote claiming that IRV gets the Condorcet winner more than 90% of
> > the time, that doesn't by itself tell us much, because the failures
> > have such a strong impact.
> >
> > I illustrate the example above by picking a method we know to be bad
> > (Borda being so extremely easy to fool with cloning and burial), and
> > showing that the poll result comes out right. If a bad method can get
> > a good result, then "getting a good result" is less useful than it
> > might appear at first glance.
> >
> > -km
> > ----
> > Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
> > info
>
