[EM] Steph: 3-level voting

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

Steph--

you said:


Why I do not like 3-level voting.

First from an informatician point of view, there is no reason to
artificially restrain the ranking input to 3-level. Why not let
the voter use as many levels (s)he wishes.

i reply:

i told why in my message: y/n uses the same ballots that are now
used in elections that allow voters to vote yes or no on several things.

its' simple. The voter doesn't have to choose which point score, in
a large range, to give someone. Give him a negative, a positive, or
nothing.

i have no objection to larger rating-ranges, but they'll require new
balloting equipment, and they may have an unnecessary degree of complexity 
compared to the simpler -1,0,1 method that i described.
if people preferred 0-10, that would be fine with me.

you continued:

It could be one, two, three
or more as fits. So a (possibly truncated) preferential ballot is ideal.
It is used in Ireland, so I do not think the rest of the planet is too
stupid to use it. If voting means expressing my preferences, let
me express all those I can and I want...

i reply:

Sure, i too prefer the best rank methods to CR, in its various versions.
But that's beside the point. There are infinitely many ways  to count
ranked ballots. That makes it difficult or impossible to get one of
the few good ones adopted. That's one reason to propse Approval or
-1,0,1 instead of a rank method.


MIKE OSSIPOFF wrote:

>
>An advantage of Approval over CR is that Approval doesn't require a
>ballot different from the existing one. An advantage of CR over
>Approval is that CR is familiar to people, whereas some mistakenly
>feel that Approval violates 1-person-1-vote.

you replied:


I am one of these persons. It is OBVIOUS that approval gives more power to
voters who like several candidates.

i reply:

Then this is a case in which something is obvious to you but incorrect.

The person who votes for one candidate only is the person whose
favorite probably has a win. The person who votes for several candidates
is someone who needs to compromise. Someone who needs to compromise
isn't more powerful.

if voting for more candidates makes you more powerful, then how
powerful would you be if you voted for all the candidates?

it's been shown several times on this list that plurality causes
voters' voting power to differ by a many times greater factor than
Approval does. Approval gives more uniform voting power. if you
disagree with those posted demonstrations, then tell us which part
you disagree with.

you continue:


It favours a concensual voter (who would
accept to rally with other candidates) over a one-minded voter.

i reply:

no it doesn't necessarily. if your favorite appears to have a win,
Approval doesn't favor you if you vote for several candidates.

And, in the comparison between Smith and jones, it doesn't matter how
many candidates you've voted for--you only have one vote for determining
whether Smith outpolls jones, or jones outpolls Smith.

you continued:

So approval
voting forces a voter to choose between approving or not his (her) second
preference and next

i reply:

That was hardly a secret.


you continued:

...without benefiting from other voter preferences
information.


i reply:

if you're saying that Approval requires more strategy than
Condorcet(wv), no one denies that.

you continued:

Rallying methods force you to make the same choice, but at the
round it occurs, the decision is more guided because some candidates have
already been identified as loosers.

i reply:

Every method determines who loses and who wins. irv decides who
loses based on incomplete information, just the top entry in each
ranking. make an important irrevocable decision based on a fraction
of the available information?

you continue:

Despite this, I do not think approval is
unfair to voters. Voters have an equal opportunity. They are just encouraged
to become multiple-approving voters.

i reply:

Wrong. if your favorite appears to have a win, then Approval doesn't
encourage you to become a multiple-approving voter. likewise, if
your favorite is the only candidate who is at all acceptable to you,
Approval doesn't encourage you to be a multiple-approving voter.

Some will vote for 1, some for 2, some for more, depending on their
utilities and their estimates of who will be the frontrunners.

i suggest that you check the Approval Strategy articles at:

http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/vote/sing.html

The first article of those will be rewritten for better clarity, but
check the articles now anyway.

you continued:


Thus approval IS UNFAIR to candidates.
Even a Condorcet Winner can loose with approval because the winner can be
the 7th choice of all voters, the last acceptable candidate.

i reply:

no comprendo

you continued:


Finally an other reason that proves approval does not give the same power to
every voter is that the candidates final weights do not represent
a proportional result with an equal weight for each voter. This is a basic
monotonicity feature.

no comprendo.  By final weights, do you mean vote totals? Approval
isn't proportional representation, but you seem to be objecting that
Approval isn't proportional in some not-quite-specified way.

you want the candidates' vote totals to be proportion to exactly what?
And why?


>But someone wrote to me suggesting a method that has both of those
>advantages: Yes/No voting:
>
>Each voter may give a candidate "Yes", "No", or nothing. A candidate's
>No votes are subtracted from his Yes votes, and the result is his
>score. The candidate with highest score wins.
>
>That's equivalent to CR, with -1, 0, 1. Which is equivalent to
>0, 1, 2 CR. Which of course is strategically equivalent to Approval.

you replied:


I definitely disagree with Mike on this. Triplets cannot be strategically
equivalent to Approval.

i reply:

you're certainly free to disagree with anything. But Approval's strategic
equivalence to CR has been demonstrated on EM. if you've demonstrated,
in the message to which i'm replying, that Approval isn't strategically
equivalent to CR, i must have missed that part of your message. Would
you repeat it for me?

you continued:


Again these methods do not ensure an equal weight to
every voters when some of them truncate their ranking

i reply:

Are you talkinga about rank methods or Approval?


you continued:


, thus it violates the
1-person, 1-vote concept (1-"full vote").

i reply:

But it isn't clear what kind of 'weight' you're referring to, or
why it should be equal.  Any voter has the power to cancel out any
other voter. Each voter has exactly one vote on whether or not Smith
will outpoll jones. Approval, compared to plurality, gives voters'
voting power that differs by a many times smaller factor, where voting
power is measured by a voter's power to improve his expectation with
his ballot. That's been demonstrated several times on EM. if you're
going to disagree with it, then tell us which part of the demonstrations
you disagree with, or post your own demonstration that it isn't true.

But we should thank you for re-affirming the claim that some people
are going to insist that Approval violates 1-person-1-vote. it's something 
that we run into periodically when talking to the public
about Approval. Thank you for demonstrating it here for us.


>Every county already has balloting equipment that supports voting
>yes or no on a list of things. People are familar with it and won't
>call it a violation of 1-person-1-vote. Moreover, many people would
>very much like to give negative votes.

you replied;

And it would really be the start for unrepresentation. An election is a
representation exercise, not an ultimate wrestling contest where only one
winner has to get out of the ring.

i reply:

So now you're saying that only proportional representation is right.
pr merely postpones single-winner choices to parliament. Single-winner
social choice methods are the fundamental implementation issue of
democracy. proportional representation has shown itself to be unwinnable
in the u.s., in these times. The reason is obvious: pr is a new concept
of representation. Voters, suspicious of their representatives, fear
a completely new represation concept, believing that it will worsen
their representation, giving more power to some groups that they fear.

single-winner reform is just a fairer way of doing what we already do
in the u.s., Canada, England, France, and other single-winner countries.

minimal change is more winnable than entirely new concepts, and better
single-winner methods would produce ultimate results similar to pr
anyway.

you continued:

Nobody should ever see its vote being
cancelled by somebody else. It is fundamental that proportions be respected.
A 5011 to 4999 win is VERY different than a 12-0 win. The first is almost a
tie, the second expresses a clear preference. When generalized to obtain a
fully proportional chamber, those results have to produce different results.

i reply:

maybe your method would be good for pr.

you continue:


Do not destroy the information from the start!

i reply:

Good point. margins and relative margins start out by destroying
information about majorities, explaining why your method is such
a violator of majority rule.


you continued:


The very same logic is
applied to compare pairwise victories and it leads to relative margin as
being the fairest comparison criteria. A 54 republicans and 48 democrats
senate is not the same than a 6 republicans senate.

i reply;

you're confusing single-winner elections with pr. i've told you
several reasons why wv is better than margins or relative margins
in terms of majority rule, lesser-of-2-evils problem, and the goal
of minimizing overruled voters, and you reply that relative margins
is better as a pr method. Then use it for pr.

you continued:

Do not dismiss the
opposition, it counts.

i reply:

Everyone's vote counts, for each pairwise comparison. But a pairwise
vote for a proposition that has already lost no longer counts the
same as a pairwise vote for a proposition that has won. We needn't speak of 
overruling the former, because it was overruled when the
public voted.

you continued:


NO to negative votes.

i reply:

Wait a minute--what does that have to do with negative votes. Are
you saying 'no to the CR that has -1,0,1' ?  it makes no difference if
we call it -1,0,1  or 0,1,2.  in one sense the former is simpler, in
another sense the latter is simpler. either would be fine with me,
as would 0,1.   i prefer 0,1.

By the way, if you feel that Approval violates 1-person-1-vote, then
how about this points system?: Each voter may give to each candidate
either 1 or 0 points. Does that violate 1-person-1-vote?

if i give 1 to more candidates than you do, i high-rate more candidates
than you do, but you low-rate more candidates than i do. who says that
my high-ratings carry more power than your low-ratings. Would you
really have more power if you high-rated lots of candidates whom you
dislike, against your own interest?

mike ossipoff


_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE*  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

----
For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), 
please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em