SB
steve bosworth
Sun, Jul 15, 2018 9:55 PM
The recent responses to Sennet’s attempt favorably to report some recent successes of RCV (i.e. IRV) prompt me to hope that readers will be willing to test the counter claims of a newly developed voting and counting method for electing multi-winners. This method is fully described in the following published article:
http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/
[http://www.jpolrisk.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/rating.jpg]http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/
Legislatures Elected by Evaluative Proportional ...http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/
www.jpolrisk.com
This article explains how a new voting method called Evaluative Proportional Representation (EPR) fully satisfies the demand that in the best representative democracy, no citizen’s vote would be involuntarily wasted, quantitatively or qualitatively. 2 EPR is intended for voters who are electing members of a legislative body, for example a ...
This method is called Evaluative Proportional Representation (EPR). EPR builds upon the arguments for Majority Judgment (MJ)offered by Balinski and Laraki (2010, MIT). For example, when electing all the members of a city council, each EPR citizen is asked to evaluate (not rank) as many of the candidates in the city as she might wish, i.e. to grade each with regard to their fitness for the office: either EXCELLENT, VERY GOOD, GOOD, ACCEPTABLE, POOR, or REJECT. The article explains the relatively simple step by step method by which all these evaluations are counted by hand (or by the algorithm provided). As a result, each citizen’s one vote continues fully to count in the deliberations and decisions of the council. It does this through the weighted vote earned by one of the elected members, i.e. the one winner whom she has helped to elect and judges to be the one most qualified for the office.
Unlike any known variety of plurality, ranking (Condorcet or IRV (RCV, STV, etc.), range, or approving voting methods, only EPR allows each citizen to guarantee that her one vote will continue to count in the council (or legislature). Also, I'd like to offer Abd ul-Rahman Lomax some hope: perhaps the extra appeal of this unique feature of EPR would prompt enough citizens in a state like California to adopt EPR by one of its referenda.
Again, only EPR allows no vote to be wasted as defined by the second paragraph of the article.
What do you think?
I look forward to your feedback.
Today's Topics:
- Re: IRV / RCv advances (Abd ul-Rahman Lomax)
Message: 1
Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2018 14:08:24 -0400
From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax abd@lomaxdesign.com
To: election-methods@lists.electorama.com
Subject: Re: [EM] IRV / RCv advances
Message-ID: 69bc286e-c970-9f6c-e60a-21e7f900f81c@lomaxdesign.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
On 7/14/2018 10:08 AM, Richard Lung wrote:
[...] Agree completely about score voting. I can't help but feel
approval voting is essentially a rebranding of cumulative voting. In
about 1867, John Stuart Mill knew it was only a trifling improvement
on plurality counting but at least opened peoples minds to alternatives.
I'd question that simply counting all the votes would be a "trifling
improvement." It would have flipped the US presidential election in
2000, almost certainly, and is a no-cost improvement, simple to
implement and easy to understand. In a two-round system, it can provide
substantial flexibility, perhaps even allowing runoffs to have a third
candidate. Counting all the votes would be, again, an improvement over
IRV, allowing voters to equal-rank. But the IRV method, by discarding
votes, is intrinsically flawed, and Bucklin actually worked when used.
The arguments that it didn't work were based on the fact that it wasn't
magic pixie dust. The only system that fixes about everything is Asset,
which hardly gets any consideration at all. My suggestion has been for
EM reformers to suggest Asset for NGOS, since it's really simple, as
well, and creates a deliberative structure, which is far more flexible
-- and functionally democratic -- than pure amalgamation. To be
fail-safe, it could be used in a nomination process, to be actually
ratified for a final result.
Approval -- and most methods -- are plurality methods unless a true
majority of the votes is required for a result. In Australia, in some
places they accomplish that by making it illegal to not completely rank.
In other words, to make a result more "democratic," coerce the voters.
Ah, the things people do to preserve the way things are!
Re 3.
Weighted Condorcet pairing arguably offers a back-door that partly
gets round the Laplace criticism of Condorcet pairing, that it does
not establish the relative importance of higher and lower preferences,
in the over-all election count.
I see Condorcet pairing primarily as a research tool for
cross-referencing the results of an at-large election with the results
from sub-elections of one-to-one contests or less minimal partitions.
Ideally, we would have an election system that does not have to watch
its back for a Condorcet paradox.
A condorcet paradox is an indication of an incomplete process. Depending
on preference strength, which some Condorcet methods attempt to
estimate, it might be meaningless. But to truly analyse election returns
requires preference strength information. Borda, again, estimates it
with an assumption of full ranking, such that with many candidates, the
"rank distance" would approximate a measure of preference strength.
But the only ballot that actually allows the voters to directly express
preference strength is a score ballot. And then some advocates of other
systems point out Condoret failure, as if that matters when preference
strength is obviously low. It doesn't. And then it is pointed out that
voters may vote "strategically," as if that is dishonest or bad. In a
Score system, there is never any incentive to reverse preference. Voters
decide what preferences matter to them, and will vote accordingly, and a
good overall system will detect situations where is ambiguity, perhaps
due to inaccurate perception of probable results, and will then set up a
runoff.
Instead of working together to create a system that will actually
improve and foster full democracy, we don't, it seems, trust the people
and want them to conform to our own ideas. In other words, same old same
old. The problem with democracy is the damn people!
But democracy is still government by consent, and whenever that fails,
oppression is inevitable. It's only a question of how bad it gets. The
logic that captured me, so many decades ago, is that we need
representation by consent and choice, not by "winners" and "losers." And
that appears to be doable. But who cares enough to try it?
Some. Not yet enough, but it's possible any day. It might only take one
person to make a proposal and carry it through, in one place.
Even an admittedly crude election like IRV (Alternative Vote),
according to this group, has only come-up with the Burlington case.
That may have been politically unfortunate. But, if about 150?
elections have not suffered the paradox, that incidence is not
statistically significant.
It is possible to show that about one-third of IRV results were not
optimal. This is done by comparing IRV results with top-two runoff
results. If a full-information ballot were used with IRV (it could be
done! Easily!) we would then know. However, actually collecting the data
to determine, definitively, if a voting system is actually working is
not a part of any reform proposal I have seen. The collecting of
information is confused with and considered less important than creating
a result, and I can easily see the counter-argument: what if this causes
the result of an election to be called into question? Won't this damage
our trust in government? I think I have actually seen that argument.
If our trust in government is based in ignorance, it's worse than a bit
of trouble. A simple, coarse-score ballot, with explicit approval
cutoff, would be cheap and easy, and how the actual result is determined
could be explicity declared on the ballot. Providing the additonal
information would be optional. One could vote the ballot, if one
chooses, as vote-for-one. It would all generate useful information, and
could guide future election method decisions.
The real comparison is how many "Bush beats Gore minus Nader" contests
are there?
In a two-party system. Duverger's law and party attempts to corner the
electorate create many of them. Look at any close election and at the
participation of minor parties in it. There may be hundreds of these a
year. As well, the existing system tends to suppress minor party
participation. New York has Fusion voting, a step in a direction of
improved democracy. It was proposed for Massachusetts and lost. Who
opposed it?
The "Democratic" party, of course! It lost. So why did people vote
against it? Well, perhaps they trusted their party. After all, isn't our
party the Good Guys? If it's bad for them, surely we don't want it! It
all makes sense until and unless one starts to look more closely, which
most people don't do. And realizing that, Dodgson proposed Asset, which
actually creates, very simply, representative government, with the good
stuff associated with that, while allowing low-level decisions, by
ordinary people who don't want their lives to be about politics, to be
useful and effective.
And how many simple plurality elections make voters act as their own
returning officers in an implicit ranked choice election, where the
voter excludes his first preference for Nader, and counts it for
second preference Gore?
The recent responses to Sennet’s attempt favorably to report some recent successes of RCV (i.e. IRV) prompt me to hope that readers will be willing to test the counter claims of a newly developed voting and counting method for electing multi-winners. This method is fully described in the following published article:
http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/
[http://www.jpolrisk.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/rating.jpg]<http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/>
Legislatures Elected by Evaluative Proportional ...<http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/>
www.jpolrisk.com
This article explains how a new voting method called Evaluative Proportional Representation (EPR) fully satisfies the demand that in the best representative democracy, no citizen’s vote would be involuntarily wasted, quantitatively or qualitatively. 2 EPR is intended for voters who are electing members of a legislative body, for example a ...
This method is called Evaluative Proportional Representation (EPR). EPR builds upon the arguments for Majority Judgment (MJ)offered by Balinski and Laraki (2010, MIT). For example, when electing all the members of a city council, each EPR citizen is asked to evaluate (not rank) as many of the candidates in the city as she might wish, i.e. to grade each with regard to their fitness for the office: either EXCELLENT, VERY GOOD, GOOD, ACCEPTABLE, POOR, or REJECT. The article explains the relatively simple step by step method by which all these evaluations are counted by hand (or by the algorithm provided). As a result, each citizen’s one vote continues fully to count in the deliberations and decisions of the council. It does this through the weighted vote earned by one of the elected members, i.e. the one winner whom she has helped to elect and judges to be the one most qualified for the office.
Unlike any known variety of plurality, ranking (Condorcet or IRV (RCV, STV, etc.), range, or approving voting methods, only EPR allows each citizen to guarantee that her one vote will continue to count in the council (or legislature). Also, I'd like to offer Abd ul-Rahman Lomax some hope: perhaps the extra appeal of this unique feature of EPR would prompt enough citizens in a state like California to adopt EPR by one of its referenda.
Again, only EPR allows no vote to be wasted as defined by the second paragraph of the article.
What do you think?
I look forward to your feedback.
________________________________
Today's Topics:
1. Re: IRV / RCv advances (Abd ul-Rahman Lomax)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2018 14:08:24 -0400
From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd@lomaxdesign.com>
To: election-methods@lists.electorama.com
Subject: Re: [EM] IRV / RCv advances
Message-ID: <69bc286e-c970-9f6c-e60a-21e7f900f81c@lomaxdesign.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
On 7/14/2018 10:08 AM, Richard Lung wrote:
> [...] Agree completely about score voting. I can't help but feel
> approval voting is essentially a rebranding of cumulative voting. In
> about 1867, John Stuart Mill knew it was only a trifling improvement
> on plurality counting but at least opened peoples minds to alternatives.
I'd question that simply counting all the votes would be a "trifling
improvement." It would have flipped the US presidential election in
2000, almost certainly, and is a no-cost improvement, simple to
implement and easy to understand. In a two-round system, it can provide
substantial flexibility, perhaps even allowing runoffs to have a third
candidate. Counting all the votes would be, again, an improvement over
IRV, allowing voters to equal-rank. But the IRV method, by discarding
votes, is intrinsically flawed, and Bucklin actually worked when used.
The arguments that it didn't work were based on the fact that it wasn't
magic pixie dust. The only system that fixes about everything is Asset,
which hardly gets any consideration at all. My suggestion has been for
EM reformers to suggest Asset for NGOS, since it's really simple, as
well, and creates a deliberative structure, which is far more flexible
-- and functionally democratic -- than pure amalgamation. To be
fail-safe, it could be used in a nomination process, to be actually
ratified for a final result.
Approval -- and most methods -- are plurality methods unless a true
majority of the votes is required for a result. In Australia, in some
places they accomplish that by making it illegal to not completely rank.
In other words, to make a result more "democratic," coerce the voters.
Ah, the things people do to preserve the way things are!
> Re 3.
> Weighted Condorcet pairing arguably offers a back-door that partly
> gets round the Laplace criticism of Condorcet pairing, that it does
> not establish the relative importance of higher and lower preferences,
> in the over-all election count.
> I see Condorcet pairing primarily as a research tool for
> cross-referencing the results of an at-large election with the results
> from sub-elections of one-to-one contests or less minimal partitions.
> Ideally, we would have an election system that does not have to watch
> its back for a Condorcet paradox.
A condorcet paradox is an indication of an incomplete process. Depending
on preference strength, which some Condorcet methods attempt to
estimate, it might be meaningless. But to truly analyse election returns
requires preference strength information. Borda, again, estimates it
with an assumption of full ranking, such that with many candidates, the
"rank distance" would approximate a measure of preference strength.
But the only ballot that actually allows the voters to directly express
preference strength is a score ballot. And then some advocates of other
systems point out Condoret failure, as if that matters when preference
strength is obviously low. It doesn't. And then it is pointed out that
voters may vote "strategically," as if that is dishonest or bad. In a
Score system, there is never any incentive to reverse preference. Voters
decide what preferences matter to them, and will vote accordingly, and a
good overall system will detect situations where is ambiguity, perhaps
due to inaccurate perception of probable results, and will then set up a
runoff.
Instead of working together to create a system that will actually
improve and foster full democracy, we don't, it seems, trust the people
and want them to conform to our own ideas. In other words, same old same
old. The problem with democracy is the damn people!
But democracy is still government by consent, and whenever that fails,
oppression is inevitable. It's only a question of how bad it gets. The
logic that captured me, so many decades ago, is that we need
representation by consent and choice, not by "winners" and "losers." And
that appears to be doable. But who cares enough to try it?
Some. Not yet enough, but it's possible any day. It might only take one
person to make a proposal and carry it through, in one place.
>
> Even an admittedly crude election like IRV (Alternative Vote),
> according to this group, has only come-up with the Burlington case.
> That may have been politically unfortunate. But, if about 150?
> elections have not suffered the paradox, that incidence is not
> statistically significant.
It is possible to show that about one-third of IRV results were not
optimal. This is done by comparing IRV results with top-two runoff
results. If a full-information ballot were used with IRV (it could be
done! Easily!) we would then know. However, actually collecting the data
to determine, definitively, if a voting system is actually working is
not a part of any reform proposal I have seen. The collecting of
information is confused with and considered less important than creating
a result, and I can easily see the counter-argument: what if this causes
the result of an election to be called into question? Won't this damage
our trust in government? I think I have actually seen that argument.
If our trust in government is based in ignorance, it's worse than a bit
of trouble. A simple, coarse-score ballot, with explicit approval
cutoff, would be cheap and easy, and how the actual result is determined
could be explicity declared on the ballot. Providing the additonal
information would be optional. One could vote the ballot, if one
chooses, as vote-for-one. It would all generate useful information, and
could guide future election method decisions.
> The real comparison is how many "Bush beats Gore minus Nader" contests
> are there?
In a two-party system. Duverger's law and party attempts to corner the
electorate create many of them. Look at any close election and at the
participation of minor parties in it. There may be hundreds of these a
year. As well, the existing system tends to suppress minor party
participation. New York has Fusion voting, a step in a direction of
improved democracy. It was proposed for Massachusetts and lost. Who
opposed it?
The "Democratic" party, of course! It lost. So why did people vote
against it? Well, perhaps they trusted their party. After all, isn't our
party the Good Guys? If it's bad for them, surely we don't want it! It
all makes sense until and unless one starts to look more closely, which
most people don't do. And realizing that, Dodgson proposed Asset, which
actually creates, very simply, representative government, with the good
stuff associated with that, while allowing low-level decisions, by
ordinary people who don't want their lives to be about politics, to be
useful and effective.
>
> And how many simple plurality elections make voters act as their own
> returning officers in an implicit ranked choice election, where the
> voter excludes his first preference for Nader, and counts it for
> second preference Gore?
My sense is that many would vote for a third party candidate if they did
not know it would be a wasted vote. It could be trivial to fix that
problem. But we obviously care about something else more. about what?
------------------------------
Subject: Digest Footer
_______________________________________________
Election-Methods mailing list
Election-Methods@lists.electorama.com
https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Flists.electorama.com%2Flistinfo.cgi%2Felection-methods-electorama.com&data=02%7C01%7C%7C60dcdb97d1124249ce1408d5ea8dcf73%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636672817145567876&sdata=41g8fWETTSrRiKIHNuqLPkxSNB9X6Rb5r%2FzABaeEdPY%3D&reserved=0
------------------------------
End of Election-Methods Digest, Vol 169, Issue 8
************************************************
AJ
Andy Jennings
Mon, Jul 16, 2018 5:26 PM
Steve,
I like the idea of a PR system based on majority judgment, but have some
concerns with this method. Are you proposing that the different elected
legislators have different voting weights in the legislature? If so, I've
heard that idea before, and I think it's clever but probably unworkable in
practice. I doubt that it would integrate well with the parliamentary
authorities (e.g. Robert's Rules of Order) that legislatures actually use
to get things done.
If not, then I think it's a mistake to eliminate all the voters who gave
the winning grade to the elected candidate. In your example, I dislike
eliminating 17 voters in round 1, for example. I think only one quota of
voters should be eliminated. You could eliminate 10 of the 17 by random
selection and leave the other 7. Or you could down-weight them all by a
factor of 7/17 and deal with fractional ballots remaining.
If it were me, I would fully eliminate any voters who gave a grade strictly
above the critical grade and down-weight the ones who gave exactly the
critical grade by some fraction so that the total amount of voting power
"used up" was equal to one quota. Then, yes, deal with fractional voters.
~ Andrew
On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 2:55 PM, steve bosworth stevebosworth@hotmail.com
wrote:
The recent responses to Sennet’s attempt favorably to report some recent
successes of RCV (i.e. IRV) prompt me to hope that readers will be willing
to test the counter claims of a newly developed voting and counting method
for electing multi-winners. This method is fully described in the
following published article:
http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-
representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/
http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/
Legislatures Elected by Evaluative Proportional ...
http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/
www.jpolrisk.com
This article explains how a new voting method called Evaluative
Proportional Representation (EPR) fully satisfies the demand that in the
best representative democracy, no citizen’s vote would be involuntarily
wasted, quantitatively or qualitatively. 2 EPR is intended for voters who
are electing members of a legislative body, for example a ...
This method is called Evaluative Proportional Representation (EPR). EPR
builds upon the arguments for Majority Judgment (MJ)offered by Balinski and
Laraki (2010, MIT). For example, when electing all the members of a city
council, each EPR citizen is asked to evaluate (not rank) as many of the
candidates in the city as she might wish, i.e. to grade each with regard to
their fitness for the office: either EXCELLENT, VERY GOOD, GOOD,
ACCEPTABLE, POOR, or REJECT. The article explains the relatively simple
step by step method by which all these evaluations are counted by hand (or
by the algorithm provided). As a result, each citizen’s one vote
continues fully to count in the deliberations and decisions of the council.
It does this through the weighted vote earned by one of the elected
members, i.e. the one winner whom she has helped to elect and judges to be
the one most qualified for the office.
Unlike any known variety of plurality, ranking (Condorcet or IRV (RCV,
STV, etc.), range, or approving voting methods, only EPR allows each
citizen to guarantee that her one vote will continue to count in the
council (or legislature). Also, I'd like to offer Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
some hope: perhaps the extra appeal of this unique feature of EPR would
prompt enough citizens in a state like California to adopt EPR by one of
its referenda.
Again, only EPR allows no vote to be wasted as defined by the second
paragraph of the article.
What do you think?
I look forward to your feedback.
Today's Topics:
1. Re: IRV / RCv advances (Abd ul-Rahman Lomax)
Message: 1
Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2018 14:08:24 -0400
From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax abd@lomaxdesign.com
To: election-methods@lists.electorama.com
Subject: Re: [EM] IRV / RCv advances
Message-ID: 69bc286e-c970-9f6c-e60a-21e7f900f81c@lomaxdesign.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
On 7/14/2018 10:08 AM, Richard Lung wrote:
[...] Agree completely about score voting. I can't help but feel
approval voting is essentially a rebranding of cumulative voting. In
about 1867, John Stuart Mill knew it was only a trifling improvement
on plurality counting but at least opened peoples minds to alternatives.
I'd question that simply counting all the votes would be a "trifling
improvement." It would have flipped the US presidential election in
2000, almost certainly, and is a no-cost improvement, simple to
implement and easy to understand. In a two-round system, it can provide
substantial flexibility, perhaps even allowing runoffs to have a third
candidate. Counting all the votes would be, again, an improvement over
IRV, allowing voters to equal-rank. But the IRV method, by discarding
votes, is intrinsically flawed, and Bucklin actually worked when used.
The arguments that it didn't work were based on the fact that it wasn't
magic pixie dust. The only system that fixes about everything is Asset,
which hardly gets any consideration at all. My suggestion has been for
EM reformers to suggest Asset for NGOS, since it's really simple, as
well, and creates a deliberative structure, which is far more flexible
-- and functionally democratic -- than pure amalgamation. To be
fail-safe, it could be used in a nomination process, to be actually
ratified for a final result.
Approval -- and most methods -- are plurality methods unless a true
majority of the votes is required for a result. In Australia, in some
places they accomplish that by making it illegal to not completely rank.
In other words, to make a result more "democratic," coerce the voters.
Ah, the things people do to preserve the way things are!
Re 3.
Weighted Condorcet pairing arguably offers a back-door that partly
gets round the Laplace criticism of Condorcet pairing, that it does
not establish the relative importance of higher and lower preferences,
in the over-all election count.
I see Condorcet pairing primarily as a research tool for
cross-referencing the results of an at-large election with the results
from sub-elections of one-to-one contests or less minimal partitions.
Ideally, we would have an election system that does not have to watch
its back for a Condorcet paradox.
A condorcet paradox is an indication of an incomplete process. Depending
on preference strength, which some Condorcet methods attempt to
estimate, it might be meaningless. But to truly analyse election returns
requires preference strength information. Borda, again, estimates it
with an assumption of full ranking, such that with many candidates, the
"rank distance" would approximate a measure of preference strength.
But the only ballot that actually allows the voters to directly express
preference strength is a score ballot. And then some advocates of other
systems point out Condoret failure, as if that matters when preference
strength is obviously low. It doesn't. And then it is pointed out that
voters may vote "strategically," as if that is dishonest or bad. In a
Score system, there is never any incentive to reverse preference. Voters
decide what preferences matter to them, and will vote accordingly, and a
good overall system will detect situations where is ambiguity, perhaps
due to inaccurate perception of probable results, and will then set up a
runoff.
Instead of working together to create a system that will actually
improve and foster full democracy, we don't, it seems, trust the people
and want them to conform to our own ideas. In other words, same old same
old. The problem with democracy is the damn people!
But democracy is still government by consent, and whenever that fails,
oppression is inevitable. It's only a question of how bad it gets. The
logic that captured me, so many decades ago, is that we need
representation by consent and choice, not by "winners" and "losers." And
that appears to be doable. But who cares enough to try it?
Some. Not yet enough, but it's possible any day. It might only take one
person to make a proposal and carry it through, in one place.
Even an admittedly crude election like IRV (Alternative Vote),
according to this group, has only come-up with the Burlington case.
That may have been politically unfortunate. But, if about 150?
elections have not suffered the paradox, that incidence is not
statistically significant.
It is possible to show that about one-third of IRV results were not
optimal. This is done by comparing IRV results with top-two runoff
results. If a full-information ballot were used with IRV (it could be
done! Easily!) we would then know. However, actually collecting the data
to determine, definitively, if a voting system is actually working is
not a part of any reform proposal I have seen. The collecting of
information is confused with and considered less important than creating
a result, and I can easily see the counter-argument: what if this causes
the result of an election to be called into question? Won't this damage
our trust in government? I think I have actually seen that argument.
If our trust in government is based in ignorance, it's worse than a bit
of trouble. A simple, coarse-score ballot, with explicit approval
cutoff, would be cheap and easy, and how the actual result is determined
could be explicity declared on the ballot. Providing the additonal
information would be optional. One could vote the ballot, if one
chooses, as vote-for-one. It would all generate useful information, and
could guide future election method decisions.
The real comparison is how many "Bush beats Gore minus Nader" contests
are there?
In a two-party system. Duverger's law and party attempts to corner the
electorate create many of them. Look at any close election and at the
participation of minor parties in it. There may be hundreds of these a
year. As well, the existing system tends to suppress minor party
participation. New York has Fusion voting, a step in a direction of
improved democracy. It was proposed for Massachusetts and lost. Who
opposed it?
The "Democratic" party, of course! It lost. So why did people vote
against it? Well, perhaps they trusted their party. After all, isn't our
party the Good Guys? If it's bad for them, surely we don't want it! It
all makes sense until and unless one starts to look more closely, which
most people don't do. And realizing that, Dodgson proposed Asset, which
actually creates, very simply, representative government, with the good
stuff associated with that, while allowing low-level decisions, by
ordinary people who don't want their lives to be about politics, to be
useful and effective.
And how many simple plurality elections make voters act as their own
returning officers in an implicit ranked choice election, where the
voter excludes his first preference for Nader, and counts it for
second preference Gore?
My sense is that many would vote for a third party candidate if they did
not know it would be a wasted vote. It could be trivial to fix that
problem. But we obviously care about something else more. about what?
Subject: Digest Footer
Election-Methods mailing list
Election-Methods@lists.electorama.com
https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=
http%3A%2F%2Flists.electorama.com%2Flistinfo.cgi%2Felection-
methods-electorama.com&data=02%7C01%7C%7C60dcdb97d1124249ce1408d5ea8dcf73%
7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636672817145567876&sdata=
41g8fWETTSrRiKIHNuqLPkxSNB9X6Rb5r%2FzABaeEdPY%3D&reserved=0
End of Election-Methods Digest, Vol 169, Issue 8
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Steve,
I like the idea of a PR system based on majority judgment, but have some
concerns with this method. Are you proposing that the different elected
legislators have different voting weights in the legislature? If so, I've
heard that idea before, and I think it's clever but probably unworkable in
practice. I doubt that it would integrate well with the parliamentary
authorities (e.g. Robert's Rules of Order) that legislatures actually use
to get things done.
If not, then I think it's a mistake to eliminate _all_ the voters who gave
the winning grade to the elected candidate. In your example, I dislike
eliminating 17 voters in round 1, for example. I think only one quota of
voters should be eliminated. You could eliminate 10 of the 17 by random
selection and leave the other 7. Or you could down-weight them all by a
factor of 7/17 and deal with fractional ballots remaining.
If it were me, I would fully eliminate any voters who gave a grade strictly
above the critical grade and down-weight the ones who gave exactly the
critical grade by some fraction so that the total amount of voting power
"used up" was equal to one quota. Then, yes, deal with fractional voters.
~ Andrew
On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 2:55 PM, steve bosworth <stevebosworth@hotmail.com>
wrote:
> The recent responses to Sennet’s attempt favorably to report some recent
> successes of RCV (i.e. IRV) prompt me to hope that readers will be willing
> to test the counter claims of a newly developed voting and counting method
> for electing multi-winners. This method is fully described in the
> following published article:
>
> http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-
> representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/
>
>
> <http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/>
> Legislatures Elected by Evaluative Proportional ...
> <http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/>
> www.jpolrisk.com
> This article explains how a new voting method called Evaluative
> Proportional Representation (EPR) fully satisfies the demand that in the
> best representative democracy, no citizen’s vote would be involuntarily
> wasted, quantitatively or qualitatively. 2 EPR is intended for voters who
> are electing members of a legislative body, for example a ...
>
>
> This method is called Evaluative Proportional Representation (EPR). EPR
> builds upon the arguments for Majority Judgment (MJ)offered by Balinski and
> Laraki (2010, MIT). For example, when electing all the members of a city
> council, each EPR citizen is asked to evaluate (not rank) as many of the
> candidates in the city as she might wish, i.e. to grade each with regard to
> their fitness for the office: either EXCELLENT, VERY GOOD, GOOD,
> ACCEPTABLE, POOR, or REJECT. The article explains the relatively simple
> step by step method by which all these evaluations are counted by hand (or
> by the algorithm provided). As a result, each citizen’s one vote
> continues fully to count in the deliberations and decisions of the council.
> It does this through the weighted vote earned by one of the elected
> members, i.e. the one winner whom she has helped to elect and judges to be
> the one most qualified for the office.
>
> Unlike any known variety of plurality, ranking (Condorcet or IRV (RCV,
> STV, etc.), range, or approving voting methods, only EPR allows each
> citizen to guarantee that her one vote will continue to count in the
> council (or legislature). Also, I'd like to offer Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
> some hope: perhaps the extra appeal of this unique feature of EPR would
> prompt enough citizens in a state like California to adopt EPR by one of
> its referenda.
>
> Again, only EPR allows no vote to be wasted as defined by the second
> paragraph of the article.
>
> What do you think?
>
> I look forward to your feedback.
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Re: IRV / RCv advances (Abd ul-Rahman Lomax)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2018 14:08:24 -0400
> From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd@lomaxdesign.com>
> To: election-methods@lists.electorama.com
> Subject: Re: [EM] IRV / RCv advances
> Message-ID: <69bc286e-c970-9f6c-e60a-21e7f900f81c@lomaxdesign.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
>
>
> On 7/14/2018 10:08 AM, Richard Lung wrote:
>
> > [...] Agree completely about score voting. I can't help but feel
> > approval voting is essentially a rebranding of cumulative voting. In
> > about 1867, John Stuart Mill knew it was only a trifling improvement
> > on plurality counting but at least opened peoples minds to alternatives.
> I'd question that simply counting all the votes would be a "trifling
> improvement." It would have flipped the US presidential election in
> 2000, almost certainly, and is a no-cost improvement, simple to
> implement and easy to understand. In a two-round system, it can provide
> substantial flexibility, perhaps even allowing runoffs to have a third
> candidate. Counting all the votes would be, again, an improvement over
> IRV, allowing voters to equal-rank. But the IRV method, by discarding
> votes, is intrinsically flawed, and Bucklin actually worked when used.
> The arguments that it didn't work were based on the fact that it wasn't
> magic pixie dust. The only system that fixes about everything is Asset,
> which hardly gets any consideration at all. My suggestion has been for
> EM reformers to suggest Asset for NGOS, since it's really simple, as
> well, and creates a deliberative structure, which is far more flexible
> -- and functionally democratic -- than pure amalgamation. To be
> fail-safe, it could be used in a nomination process, to be actually
> ratified for a final result.
>
> Approval -- and most methods -- are plurality methods unless a true
> majority of the votes is required for a result. In Australia, in some
> places they accomplish that by making it illegal to not completely rank.
> In other words, to make a result more "democratic," coerce the voters.
> Ah, the things people do to preserve the way things are!
> > Re 3.
> > Weighted Condorcet pairing arguably offers a back-door that partly
> > gets round the Laplace criticism of Condorcet pairing, that it does
> > not establish the relative importance of higher and lower preferences,
> > in the over-all election count.
> > I see Condorcet pairing primarily as a research tool for
> > cross-referencing the results of an at-large election with the results
> > from sub-elections of one-to-one contests or less minimal partitions.
> > Ideally, we would have an election system that does not have to watch
> > its back for a Condorcet paradox.
> A condorcet paradox is an indication of an incomplete process. Depending
> on preference strength, which some Condorcet methods attempt to
> estimate, it might be meaningless. But to truly analyse election returns
> requires preference strength information. Borda, again, estimates it
> with an assumption of full ranking, such that with many candidates, the
> "rank distance" would approximate a measure of preference strength.
>
> But the only ballot that actually allows the voters to directly express
> preference strength is a score ballot. And then some advocates of other
> systems point out Condoret failure, as if that matters when preference
> strength is obviously low. It doesn't. And then it is pointed out that
> voters may vote "strategically," as if that is dishonest or bad. In a
> Score system, there is never any incentive to reverse preference. Voters
> decide what preferences matter to them, and will vote accordingly, and a
> good overall system will detect situations where is ambiguity, perhaps
> due to inaccurate perception of probable results, and will then set up a
> runoff.
>
> Instead of working together to create a system that will actually
> improve and foster full democracy, we don't, it seems, trust the people
> and want them to conform to our own ideas. In other words, same old same
> old. The problem with democracy is the damn people!
>
> But democracy is still government by consent, and whenever that fails,
> oppression is inevitable. It's only a question of how bad it gets. The
> logic that captured me, so many decades ago, is that we need
> representation by consent and choice, not by "winners" and "losers." And
> that appears to be doable. But who cares enough to try it?
>
> Some. Not yet enough, but it's possible any day. It might only take one
> person to make a proposal and carry it through, in one place.
>
> >
> > Even an admittedly crude election like IRV (Alternative Vote),
> > according to this group, has only come-up with the Burlington case.
> > That may have been politically unfortunate. But, if about 150?
> > elections have not suffered the paradox, that incidence is not
> > statistically significant.
>
> It is possible to show that about one-third of IRV results were not
> optimal. This is done by comparing IRV results with top-two runoff
> results. If a full-information ballot were used with IRV (it could be
> done! Easily!) we would then know. However, actually collecting the data
> to determine, definitively, if a voting system is actually working is
> not a part of any reform proposal I have seen. The collecting of
> information is confused with and considered less important than creating
> a result, and I can easily see the counter-argument: what if this causes
> the result of an election to be called into question? Won't this damage
> our trust in government? I think I have actually seen that argument.
>
> If our trust in government is based in ignorance, it's worse than a bit
> of trouble. A simple, coarse-score ballot, with explicit approval
> cutoff, would be cheap and easy, and how the actual result is determined
> could be explicity declared on the ballot. Providing the additonal
> information would be optional. One could vote the ballot, if one
> chooses, as vote-for-one. It would all generate useful information, and
> could guide future election method decisions.
> > The real comparison is how many "Bush beats Gore minus Nader" contests
> > are there?
>
> In a two-party system. Duverger's law and party attempts to corner the
> electorate create many of them. Look at any close election and at the
> participation of minor parties in it. There may be hundreds of these a
> year. As well, the existing system tends to suppress minor party
> participation. New York has Fusion voting, a step in a direction of
> improved democracy. It was proposed for Massachusetts and lost. Who
> opposed it?
>
> The "Democratic" party, of course! It lost. So why did people vote
> against it? Well, perhaps they trusted their party. After all, isn't our
> party the Good Guys? If it's bad for them, surely we don't want it! It
> all makes sense until and unless one starts to look more closely, which
> most people don't do. And realizing that, Dodgson proposed Asset, which
> actually creates, very simply, representative government, with the good
> stuff associated with that, while allowing low-level decisions, by
> ordinary people who don't want their lives to be about politics, to be
> useful and effective.
>
> >
> > And how many simple plurality elections make voters act as their own
> > returning officers in an implicit ranked choice election, where the
> > voter excludes his first preference for Nader, and counts it for
> > second preference Gore?
> My sense is that many would vote for a third party candidate if they did
> not know it would be a wasted vote. It could be trivial to fix that
> problem. But we obviously care about something else more. about what?
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Subject: Digest Footer
>
> _______________________________________________
> Election-Methods mailing list
> Election-Methods@lists.electorama.com
> https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=
> http%3A%2F%2Flists.electorama.com%2Flistinfo.cgi%2Felection-
> methods-electorama.com&data=02%7C01%7C%7C60dcdb97d1124249ce1408d5ea8dcf73%
> 7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636672817145567876&sdata=
> 41g8fWETTSrRiKIHNuqLPkxSNB9X6Rb5r%2FzABaeEdPY%3D&reserved=0
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> End of Election-Methods Digest, Vol 169, Issue 8
> ************************************************
>
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
>
>
JQ
Jameson Quinn
Mon, Jul 16, 2018 6:09 PM
This system as described is very close to being an excellent "Proportional
Majority Judgment" method, but has one key flaw. When a candidate is
elected with more than 1 quota of support, all of their supporting ballots
are marked as used. To give a proportional method and to minimize strategic
incentives, only 1 quota of supporting ballots should be marked as used.
This could be done through some ordering criterion (highest support for
winner/lowest support for others), by proportionally reweighting ballots,
or by using up randomly-chosen ballots; the differences between these three
options would be relatively minor.
This reflects the basic way to transform any single-winner method into a
proportional multi-winner method: find single winners sequentially, and
then for each of those winners, "use up" the one quota of ballots that
"contributed most" to making that candidate the winner. There's room for
judgment calls in defining "contributed most", but other than that this is
a general template that IMO gives an optimal combination of good and
practical from methods as varied as IRV (which becomes STV), MJ, STAR,
Score, approval, Condorcet... in short, almost any single-winner method.
Are all good proportional methods examples of this pattern? I wouldn't go
that far. Delegation and (partial or full) biproportionality are extra
ingredients that can be added, giving possibilities like (Bavarian-style)
MMP, DMP, PLACE, and PAD, all worthy alternatives. But "sequential
allocation methods" using the recipe above should definitely be at least
one of the mainstays of the proportional toolkit.
Jameson
2018-07-15 17:55 GMT-04:00 steve bosworth stevebosworth@hotmail.com:
The recent responses to Sennet’s attempt favorably to report some recent
successes of RCV (i.e. IRV) prompt me to hope that readers will be willing
to test the counter claims of a newly developed voting and counting method
for electing multi-winners. This method is fully described in the
following published article:
http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-
representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/
http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/
Legislatures Elected by Evaluative Proportional ...
http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/
www.jpolrisk.com
This article explains how a new voting method called Evaluative
Proportional Representation (EPR) fully satisfies the demand that in the
best representative democracy, no citizen’s vote would be involuntarily
wasted, quantitatively or qualitatively. 2 EPR is intended for voters who
are electing members of a legislative body, for example a ...
This method is called Evaluative Proportional Representation (EPR). EPR
builds upon the arguments for Majority Judgment (MJ)offered by Balinski and
Laraki (2010, MIT). For example, when electing all the members of a city
council, each EPR citizen is asked to evaluate (not rank) as many of the
candidates in the city as she might wish, i.e. to grade each with regard to
their fitness for the office: either EXCELLENT, VERY GOOD, GOOD,
ACCEPTABLE, POOR, or REJECT. The article explains the relatively simple
step by step method by which all these evaluations are counted by hand (or
by the algorithm provided). As a result, each citizen’s one vote
continues fully to count in the deliberations and decisions of the council.
It does this through the weighted vote earned by one of the elected
members, i.e. the one winner whom she has helped to elect and judges to be
the one most qualified for the office.
Unlike any known variety of plurality, ranking (Condorcet or IRV (RCV,
STV, etc.), range, or approving voting methods, only EPR allows each
citizen to guarantee that her one vote will continue to count in the
council (or legislature). Also, I'd like to offer Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
some hope: perhaps the extra appeal of this unique feature of EPR would
prompt enough citizens in a state like California to adopt EPR by one of
its referenda.
Again, only EPR allows no vote to be wasted as defined by the second
paragraph of the article.
What do you think?
I look forward to your feedback.
Today's Topics:
1. Re: IRV / RCv advances (Abd ul-Rahman Lomax)
Message: 1
Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2018 14:08:24 -0400
From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax abd@lomaxdesign.com
To: election-methods@lists.electorama.com
Subject: Re: [EM] IRV / RCv advances
Message-ID: 69bc286e-c970-9f6c-e60a-21e7f900f81c@lomaxdesign.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
On 7/14/2018 10:08 AM, Richard Lung wrote:
[...] Agree completely about score voting. I can't help but feel
approval voting is essentially a rebranding of cumulative voting. In
about 1867, John Stuart Mill knew it was only a trifling improvement
on plurality counting but at least opened peoples minds to alternatives.
I'd question that simply counting all the votes would be a "trifling
improvement." It would have flipped the US presidential election in
2000, almost certainly, and is a no-cost improvement, simple to
implement and easy to understand. In a two-round system, it can provide
substantial flexibility, perhaps even allowing runoffs to have a third
candidate. Counting all the votes would be, again, an improvement over
IRV, allowing voters to equal-rank. But the IRV method, by discarding
votes, is intrinsically flawed, and Bucklin actually worked when used.
The arguments that it didn't work were based on the fact that it wasn't
magic pixie dust. The only system that fixes about everything is Asset,
which hardly gets any consideration at all. My suggestion has been for
EM reformers to suggest Asset for NGOS, since it's really simple, as
well, and creates a deliberative structure, which is far more flexible
-- and functionally democratic -- than pure amalgamation. To be
fail-safe, it could be used in a nomination process, to be actually
ratified for a final result.
Approval -- and most methods -- are plurality methods unless a true
majority of the votes is required for a result. In Australia, in some
places they accomplish that by making it illegal to not completely rank.
In other words, to make a result more "democratic," coerce the voters.
Ah, the things people do to preserve the way things are!
Re 3.
Weighted Condorcet pairing arguably offers a back-door that partly
gets round the Laplace criticism of Condorcet pairing, that it does
not establish the relative importance of higher and lower preferences,
in the over-all election count.
I see Condorcet pairing primarily as a research tool for
cross-referencing the results of an at-large election with the results
from sub-elections of one-to-one contests or less minimal partitions.
Ideally, we would have an election system that does not have to watch
its back for a Condorcet paradox.
A condorcet paradox is an indication of an incomplete process. Depending
on preference strength, which some Condorcet methods attempt to
estimate, it might be meaningless. But to truly analyse election returns
requires preference strength information. Borda, again, estimates it
with an assumption of full ranking, such that with many candidates, the
"rank distance" would approximate a measure of preference strength.
But the only ballot that actually allows the voters to directly express
preference strength is a score ballot. And then some advocates of other
systems point out Condoret failure, as if that matters when preference
strength is obviously low. It doesn't. And then it is pointed out that
voters may vote "strategically," as if that is dishonest or bad. In a
Score system, there is never any incentive to reverse preference. Voters
decide what preferences matter to them, and will vote accordingly, and a
good overall system will detect situations where is ambiguity, perhaps
due to inaccurate perception of probable results, and will then set up a
runoff.
Instead of working together to create a system that will actually
improve and foster full democracy, we don't, it seems, trust the people
and want them to conform to our own ideas. In other words, same old same
old. The problem with democracy is the damn people!
But democracy is still government by consent, and whenever that fails,
oppression is inevitable. It's only a question of how bad it gets. The
logic that captured me, so many decades ago, is that we need
representation by consent and choice, not by "winners" and "losers." And
that appears to be doable. But who cares enough to try it?
Some. Not yet enough, but it's possible any day. It might only take one
person to make a proposal and carry it through, in one place.
Even an admittedly crude election like IRV (Alternative Vote),
according to this group, has only come-up with the Burlington case.
That may have been politically unfortunate. But, if about 150?
elections have not suffered the paradox, that incidence is not
statistically significant.
It is possible to show that about one-third of IRV results were not
optimal. This is done by comparing IRV results with top-two runoff
results. If a full-information ballot were used with IRV (it could be
done! Easily!) we would then know. However, actually collecting the data
to determine, definitively, if a voting system is actually working is
not a part of any reform proposal I have seen. The collecting of
information is confused with and considered less important than creating
a result, and I can easily see the counter-argument: what if this causes
the result of an election to be called into question? Won't this damage
our trust in government? I think I have actually seen that argument.
If our trust in government is based in ignorance, it's worse than a bit
of trouble. A simple, coarse-score ballot, with explicit approval
cutoff, would be cheap and easy, and how the actual result is determined
could be explicity declared on the ballot. Providing the additonal
information would be optional. One could vote the ballot, if one
chooses, as vote-for-one. It would all generate useful information, and
could guide future election method decisions.
The real comparison is how many "Bush beats Gore minus Nader" contests
are there?
In a two-party system. Duverger's law and party attempts to corner the
electorate create many of them. Look at any close election and at the
participation of minor parties in it. There may be hundreds of these a
year. As well, the existing system tends to suppress minor party
participation. New York has Fusion voting, a step in a direction of
improved democracy. It was proposed for Massachusetts and lost. Who
opposed it?
The "Democratic" party, of course! It lost. So why did people vote
against it? Well, perhaps they trusted their party. After all, isn't our
party the Good Guys? If it's bad for them, surely we don't want it! It
all makes sense until and unless one starts to look more closely, which
most people don't do. And realizing that, Dodgson proposed Asset, which
actually creates, very simply, representative government, with the good
stuff associated with that, while allowing low-level decisions, by
ordinary people who don't want their lives to be about politics, to be
useful and effective.
And how many simple plurality elections make voters act as their own
returning officers in an implicit ranked choice election, where the
voter excludes his first preference for Nader, and counts it for
second preference Gore?
My sense is that many would vote for a third party candidate if they did
not know it would be a wasted vote. It could be trivial to fix that
problem. But we obviously care about something else more. about what?
Subject: Digest Footer
Election-Methods mailing list
Election-Methods@lists.electorama.com
https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=
http%3A%2F%2Flists.electorama.com%2Flistinfo.cgi%2Felection-
methods-electorama.com&data=02%7C01%7C%7C60dcdb97d1124249ce1408d5ea8dcf73%
7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636672817145567876&sdata=
41g8fWETTSrRiKIHNuqLPkxSNB9X6Rb5r%2FzABaeEdPY%3D&reserved=0
End of Election-Methods Digest, Vol 169, Issue 8
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
This system as described is very close to being an excellent "Proportional
Majority Judgment" method, but has one key flaw. When a candidate is
elected with more than 1 quota of support, all of their supporting ballots
are marked as used. To give a proportional method and to minimize strategic
incentives, only 1 quota of supporting ballots should be marked as used.
This could be done through some ordering criterion (highest support for
winner/lowest support for others), by proportionally reweighting ballots,
or by using up randomly-chosen ballots; the differences between these three
options would be relatively minor.
This reflects the basic way to transform any single-winner method into a
proportional multi-winner method: find single winners sequentially, and
then for each of those winners, "use up" the one quota of ballots that
"contributed most" to making that candidate the winner. There's room for
judgment calls in defining "contributed most", but other than that this is
a general template that IMO gives an optimal combination of good and
practical from methods as varied as IRV (which becomes STV), MJ, STAR,
Score, approval, Condorcet... in short, almost any single-winner method.
Are all good proportional methods examples of this pattern? I wouldn't go
that far. Delegation and (partial or full) biproportionality are extra
ingredients that can be added, giving possibilities like (Bavarian-style)
MMP, DMP, PLACE, and PAD, all worthy alternatives. But "sequential
allocation methods" using the recipe above should definitely be at least
one of the mainstays of the proportional toolkit.
Jameson
2018-07-15 17:55 GMT-04:00 steve bosworth <stevebosworth@hotmail.com>:
> The recent responses to Sennet’s attempt favorably to report some recent
> successes of RCV (i.e. IRV) prompt me to hope that readers will be willing
> to test the counter claims of a newly developed voting and counting method
> for electing multi-winners. This method is fully described in the
> following published article:
>
> http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-
> representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/
>
>
> <http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/>
> Legislatures Elected by Evaluative Proportional ...
> <http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/>
> www.jpolrisk.com
> This article explains how a new voting method called Evaluative
> Proportional Representation (EPR) fully satisfies the demand that in the
> best representative democracy, no citizen’s vote would be involuntarily
> wasted, quantitatively or qualitatively. 2 EPR is intended for voters who
> are electing members of a legislative body, for example a ...
>
>
> This method is called Evaluative Proportional Representation (EPR). EPR
> builds upon the arguments for Majority Judgment (MJ)offered by Balinski and
> Laraki (2010, MIT). For example, when electing all the members of a city
> council, each EPR citizen is asked to evaluate (not rank) as many of the
> candidates in the city as she might wish, i.e. to grade each with regard to
> their fitness for the office: either EXCELLENT, VERY GOOD, GOOD,
> ACCEPTABLE, POOR, or REJECT. The article explains the relatively simple
> step by step method by which all these evaluations are counted by hand (or
> by the algorithm provided). As a result, each citizen’s one vote
> continues fully to count in the deliberations and decisions of the council.
> It does this through the weighted vote earned by one of the elected
> members, i.e. the one winner whom she has helped to elect and judges to be
> the one most qualified for the office.
>
> Unlike any known variety of plurality, ranking (Condorcet or IRV (RCV,
> STV, etc.), range, or approving voting methods, only EPR allows each
> citizen to guarantee that her one vote will continue to count in the
> council (or legislature). Also, I'd like to offer Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
> some hope: perhaps the extra appeal of this unique feature of EPR would
> prompt enough citizens in a state like California to adopt EPR by one of
> its referenda.
>
> Again, only EPR allows no vote to be wasted as defined by the second
> paragraph of the article.
>
> What do you think?
>
> I look forward to your feedback.
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Re: IRV / RCv advances (Abd ul-Rahman Lomax)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2018 14:08:24 -0400
> From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd@lomaxdesign.com>
> To: election-methods@lists.electorama.com
> Subject: Re: [EM] IRV / RCv advances
> Message-ID: <69bc286e-c970-9f6c-e60a-21e7f900f81c@lomaxdesign.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
>
>
> On 7/14/2018 10:08 AM, Richard Lung wrote:
>
> > [...] Agree completely about score voting. I can't help but feel
> > approval voting is essentially a rebranding of cumulative voting. In
> > about 1867, John Stuart Mill knew it was only a trifling improvement
> > on plurality counting but at least opened peoples minds to alternatives.
> I'd question that simply counting all the votes would be a "trifling
> improvement." It would have flipped the US presidential election in
> 2000, almost certainly, and is a no-cost improvement, simple to
> implement and easy to understand. In a two-round system, it can provide
> substantial flexibility, perhaps even allowing runoffs to have a third
> candidate. Counting all the votes would be, again, an improvement over
> IRV, allowing voters to equal-rank. But the IRV method, by discarding
> votes, is intrinsically flawed, and Bucklin actually worked when used.
> The arguments that it didn't work were based on the fact that it wasn't
> magic pixie dust. The only system that fixes about everything is Asset,
> which hardly gets any consideration at all. My suggestion has been for
> EM reformers to suggest Asset for NGOS, since it's really simple, as
> well, and creates a deliberative structure, which is far more flexible
> -- and functionally democratic -- than pure amalgamation. To be
> fail-safe, it could be used in a nomination process, to be actually
> ratified for a final result.
>
> Approval -- and most methods -- are plurality methods unless a true
> majority of the votes is required for a result. In Australia, in some
> places they accomplish that by making it illegal to not completely rank.
> In other words, to make a result more "democratic," coerce the voters.
> Ah, the things people do to preserve the way things are!
> > Re 3.
> > Weighted Condorcet pairing arguably offers a back-door that partly
> > gets round the Laplace criticism of Condorcet pairing, that it does
> > not establish the relative importance of higher and lower preferences,
> > in the over-all election count.
> > I see Condorcet pairing primarily as a research tool for
> > cross-referencing the results of an at-large election with the results
> > from sub-elections of one-to-one contests or less minimal partitions.
> > Ideally, we would have an election system that does not have to watch
> > its back for a Condorcet paradox.
> A condorcet paradox is an indication of an incomplete process. Depending
> on preference strength, which some Condorcet methods attempt to
> estimate, it might be meaningless. But to truly analyse election returns
> requires preference strength information. Borda, again, estimates it
> with an assumption of full ranking, such that with many candidates, the
> "rank distance" would approximate a measure of preference strength.
>
> But the only ballot that actually allows the voters to directly express
> preference strength is a score ballot. And then some advocates of other
> systems point out Condoret failure, as if that matters when preference
> strength is obviously low. It doesn't. And then it is pointed out that
> voters may vote "strategically," as if that is dishonest or bad. In a
> Score system, there is never any incentive to reverse preference. Voters
> decide what preferences matter to them, and will vote accordingly, and a
> good overall system will detect situations where is ambiguity, perhaps
> due to inaccurate perception of probable results, and will then set up a
> runoff.
>
> Instead of working together to create a system that will actually
> improve and foster full democracy, we don't, it seems, trust the people
> and want them to conform to our own ideas. In other words, same old same
> old. The problem with democracy is the damn people!
>
> But democracy is still government by consent, and whenever that fails,
> oppression is inevitable. It's only a question of how bad it gets. The
> logic that captured me, so many decades ago, is that we need
> representation by consent and choice, not by "winners" and "losers." And
> that appears to be doable. But who cares enough to try it?
>
> Some. Not yet enough, but it's possible any day. It might only take one
> person to make a proposal and carry it through, in one place.
>
> >
> > Even an admittedly crude election like IRV (Alternative Vote),
> > according to this group, has only come-up with the Burlington case.
> > That may have been politically unfortunate. But, if about 150?
> > elections have not suffered the paradox, that incidence is not
> > statistically significant.
>
> It is possible to show that about one-third of IRV results were not
> optimal. This is done by comparing IRV results with top-two runoff
> results. If a full-information ballot were used with IRV (it could be
> done! Easily!) we would then know. However, actually collecting the data
> to determine, definitively, if a voting system is actually working is
> not a part of any reform proposal I have seen. The collecting of
> information is confused with and considered less important than creating
> a result, and I can easily see the counter-argument: what if this causes
> the result of an election to be called into question? Won't this damage
> our trust in government? I think I have actually seen that argument.
>
> If our trust in government is based in ignorance, it's worse than a bit
> of trouble. A simple, coarse-score ballot, with explicit approval
> cutoff, would be cheap and easy, and how the actual result is determined
> could be explicity declared on the ballot. Providing the additonal
> information would be optional. One could vote the ballot, if one
> chooses, as vote-for-one. It would all generate useful information, and
> could guide future election method decisions.
> > The real comparison is how many "Bush beats Gore minus Nader" contests
> > are there?
>
> In a two-party system. Duverger's law and party attempts to corner the
> electorate create many of them. Look at any close election and at the
> participation of minor parties in it. There may be hundreds of these a
> year. As well, the existing system tends to suppress minor party
> participation. New York has Fusion voting, a step in a direction of
> improved democracy. It was proposed for Massachusetts and lost. Who
> opposed it?
>
> The "Democratic" party, of course! It lost. So why did people vote
> against it? Well, perhaps they trusted their party. After all, isn't our
> party the Good Guys? If it's bad for them, surely we don't want it! It
> all makes sense until and unless one starts to look more closely, which
> most people don't do. And realizing that, Dodgson proposed Asset, which
> actually creates, very simply, representative government, with the good
> stuff associated with that, while allowing low-level decisions, by
> ordinary people who don't want their lives to be about politics, to be
> useful and effective.
>
> >
> > And how many simple plurality elections make voters act as their own
> > returning officers in an implicit ranked choice election, where the
> > voter excludes his first preference for Nader, and counts it for
> > second preference Gore?
> My sense is that many would vote for a third party candidate if they did
> not know it would be a wasted vote. It could be trivial to fix that
> problem. But we obviously care about something else more. about what?
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Subject: Digest Footer
>
> _______________________________________________
> Election-Methods mailing list
> Election-Methods@lists.electorama.com
> https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=
> http%3A%2F%2Flists.electorama.com%2Flistinfo.cgi%2Felection-
> methods-electorama.com&data=02%7C01%7C%7C60dcdb97d1124249ce1408d5ea8dcf73%
> 7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636672817145567876&sdata=
> 41g8fWETTSrRiKIHNuqLPkxSNB9X6Rb5r%2FzABaeEdPY%3D&reserved=0
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> End of Election-Methods Digest, Vol 169, Issue 8
> ************************************************
>
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
>
>
JQ
Jameson Quinn
Mon, Jul 16, 2018 6:10 PM
Looks as if Andrew beat me to the punch. I agree with his specific
suggestions.
2018-07-16 14:09 GMT-04:00 Jameson Quinn jameson.quinn@gmail.com:
This system as described is very close to being an excellent "Proportional
Majority Judgment" method, but has one key flaw. When a candidate is
elected with more than 1 quota of support, all of their supporting ballots
are marked as used. To give a proportional method and to minimize strategic
incentives, only 1 quota of supporting ballots should be marked as used.
This could be done through some ordering criterion (highest support for
winner/lowest support for others), by proportionally reweighting ballots,
or by using up randomly-chosen ballots; the differences between these three
options would be relatively minor.
This reflects the basic way to transform any single-winner method into a
proportional multi-winner method: find single winners sequentially, and
then for each of those winners, "use up" the one quota of ballots that
"contributed most" to making that candidate the winner. There's room for
judgment calls in defining "contributed most", but other than that this is
a general template that IMO gives an optimal combination of good and
practical from methods as varied as IRV (which becomes STV), MJ, STAR,
Score, approval, Condorcet... in short, almost any single-winner method.
Are all good proportional methods examples of this pattern? I wouldn't go
that far. Delegation and (partial or full) biproportionality are extra
ingredients that can be added, giving possibilities like (Bavarian-style)
MMP, DMP, PLACE, and PAD, all worthy alternatives. But "sequential
allocation methods" using the recipe above should definitely be at least
one of the mainstays of the proportional toolkit.
Jameson
2018-07-15 17:55 GMT-04:00 steve bosworth stevebosworth@hotmail.com:
The recent responses to Sennet’s attempt favorably to report some
recent successes of RCV (i.e. IRV) prompt me to hope that readers will be
willing to test the counter claims of a newly developed voting and counting
method for electing multi-winners. This method is fully described in
the following published article:
http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-
proportional-representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/
http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/
Legislatures Elected by Evaluative Proportional ...
http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/
www.jpolrisk.com
This article explains how a new voting method called Evaluative
Proportional Representation (EPR) fully satisfies the demand that in the
best representative democracy, no citizen’s vote would be involuntarily
wasted, quantitatively or qualitatively. 2 EPR is intended for voters who
are electing members of a legislative body, for example a ...
This method is called Evaluative Proportional Representation (EPR). EPR
builds upon the arguments for Majority Judgment (MJ)offered by Balinski and
Laraki (2010, MIT). For example, when electing all the members of a city
council, each EPR citizen is asked to evaluate (not rank) as many of the
candidates in the city as she might wish, i.e. to grade each with regard to
their fitness for the office: either EXCELLENT, VERY GOOD, GOOD,
ACCEPTABLE, POOR, or REJECT. The article explains the relatively simple
step by step method by which all these evaluations are counted by hand (or
by the algorithm provided). As a result, each citizen’s one vote
continues fully to count in the deliberations and decisions of the council.
It does this through the weighted vote earned by one of the elected
members, i.e. the one winner whom she has helped to elect and judges to be
the one most qualified for the office.
Unlike any known variety of plurality, ranking (Condorcet or IRV (RCV,
STV, etc.), range, or approving voting methods, only EPR allows each
citizen to guarantee that her one vote will continue to count in the
council (or legislature). Also, I'd like to offer Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
some hope: perhaps the extra appeal of this unique feature of EPR would
prompt enough citizens in a state like California to adopt EPR by one of
its referenda.
Again, only EPR allows no vote to be wasted as defined by the second
paragraph of the article.
What do you think?
I look forward to your feedback.
Today's Topics:
1. Re: IRV / RCv advances (Abd ul-Rahman Lomax)
Message: 1
Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2018 14:08:24 -0400
From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax abd@lomaxdesign.com
To: election-methods@lists.electorama.com
Subject: Re: [EM] IRV / RCv advances
Message-ID: 69bc286e-c970-9f6c-e60a-21e7f900f81c@lomaxdesign.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
On 7/14/2018 10:08 AM, Richard Lung wrote:
[...] Agree completely about score voting. I can't help but feel
approval voting is essentially a rebranding of cumulative voting. In
about 1867, John Stuart Mill knew it was only a trifling improvement
on plurality counting but at least opened peoples minds to alternatives.
I'd question that simply counting all the votes would be a "trifling
improvement." It would have flipped the US presidential election in
2000, almost certainly, and is a no-cost improvement, simple to
implement and easy to understand. In a two-round system, it can provide
substantial flexibility, perhaps even allowing runoffs to have a third
candidate. Counting all the votes would be, again, an improvement over
IRV, allowing voters to equal-rank. But the IRV method, by discarding
votes, is intrinsically flawed, and Bucklin actually worked when used.
The arguments that it didn't work were based on the fact that it wasn't
magic pixie dust. The only system that fixes about everything is Asset,
which hardly gets any consideration at all. My suggestion has been for
EM reformers to suggest Asset for NGOS, since it's really simple, as
well, and creates a deliberative structure, which is far more flexible
-- and functionally democratic -- than pure amalgamation. To be
fail-safe, it could be used in a nomination process, to be actually
ratified for a final result.
Approval -- and most methods -- are plurality methods unless a true
majority of the votes is required for a result. In Australia, in some
places they accomplish that by making it illegal to not completely rank.
In other words, to make a result more "democratic," coerce the voters.
Ah, the things people do to preserve the way things are!
Re 3.
Weighted Condorcet pairing arguably offers a back-door that partly
gets round the Laplace criticism of Condorcet pairing, that it does
not establish the relative importance of higher and lower preferences,
in the over-all election count.
I see Condorcet pairing primarily as a research tool for
cross-referencing the results of an at-large election with the results
from sub-elections of one-to-one contests or less minimal partitions.
Ideally, we would have an election system that does not have to watch
its back for a Condorcet paradox.
A condorcet paradox is an indication of an incomplete process. Depending
on preference strength, which some Condorcet methods attempt to
estimate, it might be meaningless. But to truly analyse election returns
requires preference strength information. Borda, again, estimates it
with an assumption of full ranking, such that with many candidates, the
"rank distance" would approximate a measure of preference strength.
But the only ballot that actually allows the voters to directly express
preference strength is a score ballot. And then some advocates of other
systems point out Condoret failure, as if that matters when preference
strength is obviously low. It doesn't. And then it is pointed out that
voters may vote "strategically," as if that is dishonest or bad. In a
Score system, there is never any incentive to reverse preference. Voters
decide what preferences matter to them, and will vote accordingly, and a
good overall system will detect situations where is ambiguity, perhaps
due to inaccurate perception of probable results, and will then set up a
runoff.
Instead of working together to create a system that will actually
improve and foster full democracy, we don't, it seems, trust the people
and want them to conform to our own ideas. In other words, same old same
old. The problem with democracy is the damn people!
But democracy is still government by consent, and whenever that fails,
oppression is inevitable. It's only a question of how bad it gets. The
logic that captured me, so many decades ago, is that we need
representation by consent and choice, not by "winners" and "losers." And
that appears to be doable. But who cares enough to try it?
Some. Not yet enough, but it's possible any day. It might only take one
person to make a proposal and carry it through, in one place.
Even an admittedly crude election like IRV (Alternative Vote),
according to this group, has only come-up with the Burlington case.
That may have been politically unfortunate. But, if about 150?
elections have not suffered the paradox, that incidence is not
statistically significant.
It is possible to show that about one-third of IRV results were not
optimal. This is done by comparing IRV results with top-two runoff
results. If a full-information ballot were used with IRV (it could be
done! Easily!) we would then know. However, actually collecting the data
to determine, definitively, if a voting system is actually working is
not a part of any reform proposal I have seen. The collecting of
information is confused with and considered less important than creating
a result, and I can easily see the counter-argument: what if this causes
the result of an election to be called into question? Won't this damage
our trust in government? I think I have actually seen that argument.
If our trust in government is based in ignorance, it's worse than a bit
of trouble. A simple, coarse-score ballot, with explicit approval
cutoff, would be cheap and easy, and how the actual result is determined
could be explicity declared on the ballot. Providing the additonal
information would be optional. One could vote the ballot, if one
chooses, as vote-for-one. It would all generate useful information, and
could guide future election method decisions.
The real comparison is how many "Bush beats Gore minus Nader" contests
are there?
In a two-party system. Duverger's law and party attempts to corner the
electorate create many of them. Look at any close election and at the
participation of minor parties in it. There may be hundreds of these a
year. As well, the existing system tends to suppress minor party
participation. New York has Fusion voting, a step in a direction of
improved democracy. It was proposed for Massachusetts and lost. Who
opposed it?
The "Democratic" party, of course! It lost. So why did people vote
against it? Well, perhaps they trusted their party. After all, isn't our
party the Good Guys? If it's bad for them, surely we don't want it! It
all makes sense until and unless one starts to look more closely, which
most people don't do. And realizing that, Dodgson proposed Asset, which
actually creates, very simply, representative government, with the good
stuff associated with that, while allowing low-level decisions, by
ordinary people who don't want their lives to be about politics, to be
useful and effective.
And how many simple plurality elections make voters act as their own
returning officers in an implicit ranked choice election, where the
voter excludes his first preference for Nader, and counts it for
second preference Gore?
My sense is that many would vote for a third party candidate if they did
not know it would be a wasted vote. It could be trivial to fix that
problem. But we obviously care about something else more. about what?
Subject: Digest Footer
Election-Methods mailing list
Election-Methods@lists.electorama.com
https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%
2F%2Flists.electorama.com%2Flistinfo.cgi%2Felection-meth
ods-electorama.com&data=02%7C01%7C%7C60dcdb97d1124249ce14
08d5ea8dcf73%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C63
6672817145567876&sdata=41g8fWETTSrRiKIHNuqLPkxSNB9X6Rb5r%
2FzABaeEdPY%3D&reserved=0
End of Election-Methods Digest, Vol 169, Issue 8
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list
info
Looks as if Andrew beat me to the punch. I agree with his specific
suggestions.
2018-07-16 14:09 GMT-04:00 Jameson Quinn <jameson.quinn@gmail.com>:
> This system as described is very close to being an excellent "Proportional
> Majority Judgment" method, but has one key flaw. When a candidate is
> elected with more than 1 quota of support, all of their supporting ballots
> are marked as used. To give a proportional method and to minimize strategic
> incentives, only 1 quota of supporting ballots should be marked as used.
> This could be done through some ordering criterion (highest support for
> winner/lowest support for others), by proportionally reweighting ballots,
> or by using up randomly-chosen ballots; the differences between these three
> options would be relatively minor.
>
> This reflects the basic way to transform any single-winner method into a
> proportional multi-winner method: find single winners sequentially, and
> then for each of those winners, "use up" the one quota of ballots that
> "contributed most" to making that candidate the winner. There's room for
> judgment calls in defining "contributed most", but other than that this is
> a general template that IMO gives an optimal combination of good and
> practical from methods as varied as IRV (which becomes STV), MJ, STAR,
> Score, approval, Condorcet... in short, almost any single-winner method.
>
> Are all good proportional methods examples of this pattern? I wouldn't go
> that far. Delegation and (partial or full) biproportionality are extra
> ingredients that can be added, giving possibilities like (Bavarian-style)
> MMP, DMP, PLACE, and PAD, all worthy alternatives. But "sequential
> allocation methods" using the recipe above should definitely be at least
> one of the mainstays of the proportional toolkit.
>
> Jameson
>
> 2018-07-15 17:55 GMT-04:00 steve bosworth <stevebosworth@hotmail.com>:
>
>> The recent responses to Sennet’s attempt favorably to report some
>> recent successes of RCV (i.e. IRV) prompt me to hope that readers will be
>> willing to test the counter claims of a newly developed voting and counting
>> method for electing multi-winners. This method is fully described in
>> the following published article:
>>
>> http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-
>> proportional-representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/
>>
>>
>> <http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/>
>> Legislatures Elected by Evaluative Proportional ...
>> <http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/>
>> www.jpolrisk.com
>> This article explains how a new voting method called Evaluative
>> Proportional Representation (EPR) fully satisfies the demand that in the
>> best representative democracy, no citizen’s vote would be involuntarily
>> wasted, quantitatively or qualitatively. 2 EPR is intended for voters who
>> are electing members of a legislative body, for example a ...
>>
>>
>> This method is called Evaluative Proportional Representation (EPR). EPR
>> builds upon the arguments for Majority Judgment (MJ)offered by Balinski and
>> Laraki (2010, MIT). For example, when electing all the members of a city
>> council, each EPR citizen is asked to evaluate (not rank) as many of the
>> candidates in the city as she might wish, i.e. to grade each with regard to
>> their fitness for the office: either EXCELLENT, VERY GOOD, GOOD,
>> ACCEPTABLE, POOR, or REJECT. The article explains the relatively simple
>> step by step method by which all these evaluations are counted by hand (or
>> by the algorithm provided). As a result, each citizen’s one vote
>> continues fully to count in the deliberations and decisions of the council.
>> It does this through the weighted vote earned by one of the elected
>> members, i.e. the one winner whom she has helped to elect and judges to be
>> the one most qualified for the office.
>>
>> Unlike any known variety of plurality, ranking (Condorcet or IRV (RCV,
>> STV, etc.), range, or approving voting methods, only EPR allows each
>> citizen to guarantee that her one vote will continue to count in the
>> council (or legislature). Also, I'd like to offer Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
>> some hope: perhaps the extra appeal of this unique feature of EPR would
>> prompt enough citizens in a state like California to adopt EPR by one of
>> its referenda.
>>
>> Again, only EPR allows no vote to be wasted as defined by the second
>> paragraph of the article.
>>
>> What do you think?
>>
>> I look forward to your feedback.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------
>>
>>
>>
>> Today's Topics:
>>
>> 1. Re: IRV / RCv advances (Abd ul-Rahman Lomax)
>>
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Message: 1
>> Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2018 14:08:24 -0400
>> From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd@lomaxdesign.com>
>> To: election-methods@lists.electorama.com
>> Subject: Re: [EM] IRV / RCv advances
>> Message-ID: <69bc286e-c970-9f6c-e60a-21e7f900f81c@lomaxdesign.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
>>
>>
>> On 7/14/2018 10:08 AM, Richard Lung wrote:
>>
>> > [...] Agree completely about score voting. I can't help but feel
>> > approval voting is essentially a rebranding of cumulative voting. In
>> > about 1867, John Stuart Mill knew it was only a trifling improvement
>> > on plurality counting but at least opened peoples minds to alternatives.
>> I'd question that simply counting all the votes would be a "trifling
>> improvement." It would have flipped the US presidential election in
>> 2000, almost certainly, and is a no-cost improvement, simple to
>> implement and easy to understand. In a two-round system, it can provide
>> substantial flexibility, perhaps even allowing runoffs to have a third
>> candidate. Counting all the votes would be, again, an improvement over
>> IRV, allowing voters to equal-rank. But the IRV method, by discarding
>> votes, is intrinsically flawed, and Bucklin actually worked when used.
>> The arguments that it didn't work were based on the fact that it wasn't
>> magic pixie dust. The only system that fixes about everything is Asset,
>> which hardly gets any consideration at all. My suggestion has been for
>> EM reformers to suggest Asset for NGOS, since it's really simple, as
>> well, and creates a deliberative structure, which is far more flexible
>> -- and functionally democratic -- than pure amalgamation. To be
>> fail-safe, it could be used in a nomination process, to be actually
>> ratified for a final result.
>>
>> Approval -- and most methods -- are plurality methods unless a true
>> majority of the votes is required for a result. In Australia, in some
>> places they accomplish that by making it illegal to not completely rank.
>> In other words, to make a result more "democratic," coerce the voters.
>> Ah, the things people do to preserve the way things are!
>> > Re 3.
>> > Weighted Condorcet pairing arguably offers a back-door that partly
>> > gets round the Laplace criticism of Condorcet pairing, that it does
>> > not establish the relative importance of higher and lower preferences,
>> > in the over-all election count.
>> > I see Condorcet pairing primarily as a research tool for
>> > cross-referencing the results of an at-large election with the results
>> > from sub-elections of one-to-one contests or less minimal partitions.
>> > Ideally, we would have an election system that does not have to watch
>> > its back for a Condorcet paradox.
>> A condorcet paradox is an indication of an incomplete process. Depending
>> on preference strength, which some Condorcet methods attempt to
>> estimate, it might be meaningless. But to truly analyse election returns
>> requires preference strength information. Borda, again, estimates it
>> with an assumption of full ranking, such that with many candidates, the
>> "rank distance" would approximate a measure of preference strength.
>>
>> But the only ballot that actually allows the voters to directly express
>> preference strength is a score ballot. And then some advocates of other
>> systems point out Condoret failure, as if that matters when preference
>> strength is obviously low. It doesn't. And then it is pointed out that
>> voters may vote "strategically," as if that is dishonest or bad. In a
>> Score system, there is never any incentive to reverse preference. Voters
>> decide what preferences matter to them, and will vote accordingly, and a
>> good overall system will detect situations where is ambiguity, perhaps
>> due to inaccurate perception of probable results, and will then set up a
>> runoff.
>>
>> Instead of working together to create a system that will actually
>> improve and foster full democracy, we don't, it seems, trust the people
>> and want them to conform to our own ideas. In other words, same old same
>> old. The problem with democracy is the damn people!
>>
>> But democracy is still government by consent, and whenever that fails,
>> oppression is inevitable. It's only a question of how bad it gets. The
>> logic that captured me, so many decades ago, is that we need
>> representation by consent and choice, not by "winners" and "losers." And
>> that appears to be doable. But who cares enough to try it?
>>
>> Some. Not yet enough, but it's possible any day. It might only take one
>> person to make a proposal and carry it through, in one place.
>>
>> >
>> > Even an admittedly crude election like IRV (Alternative Vote),
>> > according to this group, has only come-up with the Burlington case.
>> > That may have been politically unfortunate. But, if about 150?
>> > elections have not suffered the paradox, that incidence is not
>> > statistically significant.
>>
>> It is possible to show that about one-third of IRV results were not
>> optimal. This is done by comparing IRV results with top-two runoff
>> results. If a full-information ballot were used with IRV (it could be
>> done! Easily!) we would then know. However, actually collecting the data
>> to determine, definitively, if a voting system is actually working is
>> not a part of any reform proposal I have seen. The collecting of
>> information is confused with and considered less important than creating
>> a result, and I can easily see the counter-argument: what if this causes
>> the result of an election to be called into question? Won't this damage
>> our trust in government? I think I have actually seen that argument.
>>
>> If our trust in government is based in ignorance, it's worse than a bit
>> of trouble. A simple, coarse-score ballot, with explicit approval
>> cutoff, would be cheap and easy, and how the actual result is determined
>> could be explicity declared on the ballot. Providing the additonal
>> information would be optional. One could vote the ballot, if one
>> chooses, as vote-for-one. It would all generate useful information, and
>> could guide future election method decisions.
>> > The real comparison is how many "Bush beats Gore minus Nader" contests
>> > are there?
>>
>> In a two-party system. Duverger's law and party attempts to corner the
>> electorate create many of them. Look at any close election and at the
>> participation of minor parties in it. There may be hundreds of these a
>> year. As well, the existing system tends to suppress minor party
>> participation. New York has Fusion voting, a step in a direction of
>> improved democracy. It was proposed for Massachusetts and lost. Who
>> opposed it?
>>
>> The "Democratic" party, of course! It lost. So why did people vote
>> against it? Well, perhaps they trusted their party. After all, isn't our
>> party the Good Guys? If it's bad for them, surely we don't want it! It
>> all makes sense until and unless one starts to look more closely, which
>> most people don't do. And realizing that, Dodgson proposed Asset, which
>> actually creates, very simply, representative government, with the good
>> stuff associated with that, while allowing low-level decisions, by
>> ordinary people who don't want their lives to be about politics, to be
>> useful and effective.
>>
>> >
>> > And how many simple plurality elections make voters act as their own
>> > returning officers in an implicit ranked choice election, where the
>> > voter excludes his first preference for Nader, and counts it for
>> > second preference Gore?
>> My sense is that many would vote for a third party candidate if they did
>> not know it would be a wasted vote. It could be trivial to fix that
>> problem. But we obviously care about something else more. about what?
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------
>>
>> Subject: Digest Footer
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Election-Methods mailing list
>> Election-Methods@lists.electorama.com
>> https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%
>> 2F%2Flists.electorama.com%2Flistinfo.cgi%2Felection-meth
>> ods-electorama.com&data=02%7C01%7C%7C60dcdb97d1124249ce14
>> 08d5ea8dcf73%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C63
>> 6672817145567876&sdata=41g8fWETTSrRiKIHNuqLPkxSNB9X6Rb5r%
>> 2FzABaeEdPY%3D&reserved=0
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------
>>
>> End of Election-Methods Digest, Vol 169, Issue 8
>> ************************************************
>>
>> ----
>> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list
>> info
>>
>>
>
KM
Kristofer Munsterhjelm
Mon, Jul 16, 2018 7:21 PM
On 2018-07-16 20:09, Jameson Quinn wrote:
This system as described is very close to being an excellent
"Proportional Majority Judgment" method, but has one key flaw. When a
candidate is elected with more than 1 quota of support, all of their
supporting ballots are marked as used. To give a proportional method and
to minimize strategic incentives, only 1 quota of supporting ballots
should be marked as used. This could be done through some ordering
criterion (highest support for winner/lowest support for others), by
proportionally reweighting ballots, or by using up randomly-chosen
ballots; the differences between these three options would be relatively
minor.
This reflects the basic way to transform any single-winner method into a
proportional multi-winner method: find single winners sequentially, and
then for each of those winners, "use up" the one quota of ballots that
"contributed most" to making that candidate the winner. There's room for
judgment calls in defining "contributed most", but other than that this
is a general template that IMO gives an optimal combination of good and
practical from methods as varied as IRV (which becomes STV), MJ, STAR,
Score, approval, Condorcet... in short, almost any single-winner method.
Most of those multiwinner methods have unweighted winners. In EPR (as I
understand it), each winner has a different weight in the assembly, and
thus instead of discarding just a quota and then redistributing the
surplus, it's possible to assign more than a quota to a single winner,
who benefits from this "supermajority" by an increased weight.
To use SNTV as an example, suppose you have a Plurality election of the
type:
A: 100
B: 80
C: 30
D: 20
and three to elect. If you use ordinary SNTV, then the voters who voted
for A wasted their votes, since they voted in excess of what was
required to have A win. However, with weighted voting, it's a simple
matter of letting A have a weight of 47.6% of the total vote, B have a
weight of 38.1% and so on.
Suppose e.g. that the A- and B-voters both had D as their second
preference. Unweighted, the wasted votes for A and B deprived D of his
victory, as in SNTV, some fractions of the A- and B-voters could have
strategically voted for D instead to get him above C's count, and that's
what a better method with surplus redistribution would have done anyway.
In a weighted method, the A and B-voters get compensated for C being
elected, in the form of A and B having a greater share of power; and
this is preferable from the point of view of A- and B-voters because
they get to contribute directly to the power of their first choice
candidates instead of having that power go to their second choice.
With all that said, there's another argument that could be made in favor
of doing surplus redistribution, which is that under tactical
nomination, you could get something analogous to surplus redistribution
anyway. If the A-voters consider D to be close to A, then some of them
could vote for D, after which the fixed council size would push C off.
The benefit of reducing C's strength to zero could then make up for A's
relative power being reduced in the council.
A stronger strategy would involve cloning A into A1 and A2 and, instead
of redistributing votes to D, distributing them between A1 and A2. That
produces a more party list-like outcome -- but that strategy would also
be possible under an unweighted multiwinner system.
On 2018-07-16 20:09, Jameson Quinn wrote:
> This system as described is very close to being an excellent
> "Proportional Majority Judgment" method, but has one key flaw. When a
> candidate is elected with more than 1 quota of support, all of their
> supporting ballots are marked as used. To give a proportional method and
> to minimize strategic incentives, only 1 quota of supporting ballots
> should be marked as used. This could be done through some ordering
> criterion (highest support for winner/lowest support for others), by
> proportionally reweighting ballots, or by using up randomly-chosen
> ballots; the differences between these three options would be relatively
> minor.
>
> This reflects the basic way to transform any single-winner method into a
> proportional multi-winner method: find single winners sequentially, and
> then for each of those winners, "use up" the one quota of ballots that
> "contributed most" to making that candidate the winner. There's room for
> judgment calls in defining "contributed most", but other than that this
> is a general template that IMO gives an optimal combination of good and
> practical from methods as varied as IRV (which becomes STV), MJ, STAR,
> Score, approval, Condorcet... in short, almost any single-winner method.
Most of those multiwinner methods have unweighted winners. In EPR (as I
understand it), each winner has a different weight in the assembly, and
thus instead of discarding just a quota and then redistributing the
surplus, it's possible to assign more than a quota to a single winner,
who benefits from this "supermajority" by an increased weight.
To use SNTV as an example, suppose you have a Plurality election of the
type:
A: 100
B: 80
C: 30
D: 20
and three to elect. If you use ordinary SNTV, then the voters who voted
for A wasted their votes, since they voted in excess of what was
required to have A win. However, with weighted voting, it's a simple
matter of letting A have a weight of 47.6% of the total vote, B have a
weight of 38.1% and so on.
Suppose e.g. that the A- and B-voters both had D as their second
preference. Unweighted, the wasted votes for A and B deprived D of his
victory, as in SNTV, some fractions of the A- and B-voters could have
strategically voted for D instead to get him above C's count, and that's
what a better method with surplus redistribution would have done anyway.
In a weighted method, the A and B-voters get compensated for C being
elected, in the form of A and B having a greater share of power; and
this is preferable from the point of view of A- and B-voters because
they get to contribute directly to the power of their first choice
candidates instead of having that power go to their second choice.
With all that said, there's another argument that could be made in favor
of doing surplus redistribution, which is that under tactical
nomination, you could get something analogous to surplus redistribution
anyway. If the A-voters consider D to be close to A, then some of them
could vote for D, after which the fixed council size would push C off.
The benefit of reducing C's strength to zero could then make up for A's
relative power being reduced in the council.
A stronger strategy would involve cloning A into A1 and A2 and, instead
of redistributing votes to D, distributing them between A1 and A2. That
produces a more party list-like outcome -- but that strategy would also
be possible under an unweighted multiwinner system.
AU
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
Mon, Jul 16, 2018 9:14 PM
People should be aware of Delegable Proxy, which can create full
representation. There have been proposals for assemblies with variable
voting power, i.e., where those elected to the Assembly cast as many
votes as they received in the election.
However, I prefer to move toward full democracy along this path.
First of all, propose and implement simple Asset Voting in NGOs, where
experience with it can be gained.
Then, as it becomes known that what Asset can do is possible, it can be
proposed for public elections. The rest of this is a plan for an NGO:
-
Use simple asset (vote for one!) with the Hare quota ((i.e., votes/seats)
-
Anyone may register to become an elector. If there are eligible
persons not registered, they may not receive votes in the election, but
may then allow themselves to be chosen for further participation. One of
the Asset strengths is that it can elect candidates who did not receive
any votes in the secret ballot election.\
-
Outside of Questions of Privilege, or related motions (such as
Adjourn) the vote required for any measure to pass is a majority of the
number of seats as was used to define the quota. Seats, then, will
always maximize their own power by cooperating to create the maximum
number of seats. It may be normal for a seat to be vacant, or even
possibly more than one. Electors may still function to represent the
voters until the next election.
-
Having created a fully representative assembly, it is possible to
allow certain kinds of voting directly by electors. It is not necessary
to specify the rules for this at this point, but the basic concept would
be that to make procedural motions and vote on them, one must have a
seat. But measures with lasting effect could be open for internet voting
by electors. If an elector does not vote, the seat's vote counts as full
strength, one full vote (or it could be reported and used as the quota
of votes). If an elector does vote, then the seat's vote is devalued by
the number of votes the elector contributed to the seats that are
normally serving. This is trivial to do with computers, and would all be
open, visible. This could become important where seats are put together
with heavy compromise, from the "dregs," i.e., smaller amounts of
leftover votes not already assigned.
My guess is that direct voting would only be rarely used. It's too much
work to pay attention to the process, except for a few electors, I
suspect, and for a few questions of particular importance for them.
Rather, what I suspect is that voters, and electors especially as public
voters, would focus on finding truly qualifed people to represent them,
people who, if the elector disagrees with them on an issue, might be
inclined to trust the one they chose. After all, they are likely to be
more informed!
Most discussion of voting systems pay little attention to what might be
called collective intelligence, how to enhance it.
My opinion is that any organization that creates a deliberative body
based on Asset will be more likely to prosper. Asset is designed to
foster cooperation, not conflict. It will not magically create it, but
it simply gets rid of the necessity for oppositional campaigning.
On 7/16/2018 3:21 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
Most of those multiwinner methods have unweighted winners. In EPR (as
I understand it), each winner has a different weight in the assembly,
and thus instead of discarding just a quota and then redistributing
the surplus, it's possible to assign more than a quota to a single
winner, who benefits from this "supermajority" by an increased weight.
People should be aware of Delegable Proxy, which can create full
representation. There have been proposals for assemblies with variable
voting power, i.e., where those elected to the Assembly cast as many
votes as they received in the election.
However, I prefer to move toward full democracy along this path.
First of all, propose and implement simple Asset Voting in NGOs, where
experience with it can be gained.
Then, as it becomes known that what Asset can do is possible, it can be
proposed for public elections. The rest of this is a plan for an NGO:
1. Use simple asset (vote for one!) with the Hare quota ((i.e., votes/seats)
2. Anyone may register to become an elector. If there are eligible
persons not registered, they may not receive votes in the election, but
may then allow themselves to be chosen for further participation. One of
the Asset strengths is that it can elect candidates who did not receive
any votes in the secret ballot election.\
3. Outside of Questions of Privilege, or related motions (such as
Adjourn) the vote required for any measure to pass is a majority of the
number of seats as was used to define the quota. Seats, then, will
always maximize their own power by cooperating to create the maximum
number of seats. It may be normal for a seat to be vacant, or even
possibly more than one. Electors may still function to represent the
voters until the next election.
4. Having created a fully representative assembly, it is possible to
allow certain kinds of voting directly by electors. It is not necessary
to specify the rules for this at this point, but the basic concept would
be that to make procedural motions and vote on them, one must have a
seat. But measures with lasting effect could be open for internet voting
by electors. If an elector does not vote, the seat's vote counts as full
strength, one full vote (or it could be reported and used as the quota
of votes). If an elector does vote, then the seat's vote is devalued by
the number of votes the elector contributed to the seats that are
normally serving. This is trivial to do with computers, and would all be
open, visible. This could become important where seats are put together
with heavy compromise, from the "dregs," i.e., smaller amounts of
leftover votes not already assigned.
My guess is that direct voting would only be rarely used. It's too much
work to pay attention to the process, except for a few electors, I
suspect, and for a few questions of particular importance for them.
Rather, what I suspect is that voters, and electors especially as public
voters, would focus on finding truly qualifed people to represent them,
people who, if the elector disagrees with them on an issue, might be
inclined to trust the one they chose. After all, they are likely to be
more informed!
Most discussion of voting systems pay little attention to what might be
called collective intelligence, how to enhance it.
My opinion is that any organization that creates a deliberative body
based on Asset will be more likely to prosper. Asset is designed to
foster cooperation, not conflict. It will not magically create it, but
it simply gets rid of the necessity for oppositional campaigning.
On 7/16/2018 3:21 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
>
> Most of those multiwinner methods have unweighted winners. In EPR (as
> I understand it), each winner has a different weight in the assembly,
> and thus instead of discarding just a quota and then redistributing
> the surplus, it's possible to assign more than a quota to a single
> winner, who benefits from this "supermajority" by an increased weight.
