[EM] RE: Election-methods digest, Vol 1 #573 - 4 msgs
MIKE OSSIPOFF
nkklrp at hotmail.com
Wed Mar 31 18:03:09 PST 2004
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Subject: Election-methods digest, Vol 1 #573 - 4 msgs
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 12:02:40 -0800
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Today's Topics:
1. Re: Approval & CR are 2nd best; Approval STV
(=?iso-8859-1?q?Kevin=20Venzke?=)
2. RE: IRV - disincentives (James Gilmour)
3. Re: IRV - disincentives (stephane.rouillon at sympatico.ca)
4. Re: Primaries? (Adam Tarr)
--__--__--
Message: 1
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 06:03:56 +0200 (CEST)
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Kevin=20Venzke?= <stepjak at yahoo.fr>
Subject: Re: [EM] Approval & CR are 2nd best; Approval STV
To: election-methods at electorama.com
Mike,
--- MIKE OSSIPOFF <nkklrp at hotmail.com> a écrit : >
> Approval & CR are the 2nd best, if we're talking about proposed methods.
> Bucklin and ERBucklin(whole) are between Condorcet and Approval, in
merit.
> But Bucklin & ERBucklin(whole) aren't proposed.
In my opinion, Bucklin versions aren't better than Approval. Strategy in
ERBucklin, as far as when to "compress" a ranking into an equality, becomes
a game of chicken, where the optimal strategy depends solely on what
everyone
else guesses is *their* optimal strategy.
While Bucklin could catch a majority favorite, it also has compromising
incentive, which would cast doubt on its results.
A method I would rank between Condorcet and Approval is AER, or "Approval
STV."
It's IRV, but the elimination order is based on approval. Because the
approval
counts don't change, and the elimination order is thus fixed from the
beginning,
it's monotonic. It's intuitive, and gives similar results to WV methods.
Kevin Venzke
stepjak at yahoo.fr
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Message: 2
Reply-To: <jgilmour at globalnet.co.uk>
From: "James Gilmour" <jgilmour at globalnet.co.uk>
To: <election-methods at electorama.com>
Subject: RE: [EM] IRV - disincentives
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 10:19:58 +0100
Organization: Dr James Gilmour
Eric Gorr> Sent: Wednesday, March 31, 2004 12:40 AM
> Consider a case with four candidates and a voter who casts a ballot:
> a > b > c > d
> but does not want to see either C or D win the election. It does not
> seem to me that the voter would be any better off if they had cast a
> ballot:
> a > b
> preventing the possibility of their ballot being used to increase the
> vote total for C.
Your chosen voter had TWO objectives, as defined by the complete (assumed
sincere) list of
preferences: a > b > c > d. This sequence of preferences tells us this
voter does not want D
elected (anyone in preference to D), AND that were it come to choice between
C and D, this voter
would prefer C over D.
The truncated list "a > b" tells us nothing about the voter's preferences as
between C and D. By
truncating, the voter may have ensured that his/her vote never counts for C
or D, but it fails to
register part of the voter's sincere preferences, ie c > d. In IRV (and
STV-PR) it is impossible to
mark your preferences to help prevent the election of two candidate: you can
put only one candidate
in the last position (and I have done that in real elections).
I would suggest that a voter with the sincere preferences you suggest should
always mark a
preference for all candidates, or at least, a > b > c, because that has the
same effect in most
implementations of IRV and STV-PR.
James Gilmour
--__--__--
Message: 3
From: stephane.rouillon at sympatico.ca
To: Eric Gorr <eric at ericgorr.net>, <election-methods at electorama.com>
Subject: Re: [EM] IRV - disincentives
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 9:23:16 -0500
The answer is no.
Clearly if a and b are eliminated,
the ballot of your voter had no impact on it
(a>b) or (a>b>c>d).
So those last preferences kick in only once a and b are eliminated co you
are better with the full preferences to
avoid at least d over c.
However their is an incentive for unsincere ranking
b>a>c>d if you think most voters who vote for b in 1st place
do not prefer a as 2nd but most voters for a in 1st place prefer b as 2nd.
This is because IRV is non-monotonic.
Blake and other specialists on this list had a name for that: I think it was
"digging" or something alike...
> De: Eric Gorr <eric at ericgorr.net>
> Date: 2004/03/30 mar. PM 06:39:39 GMT-05:00
> À: election-methods at electorama.com
> Objet: [EM] IRV - disincentives
>
> How would others answer this question:
>
> Is there a disincentive in IRV to rank candidates
> you do not want to see win?
>
> I am thinking the answer is NO, but there is something nagging at me
> which says the answer could be YES.
>
> Consider a case with four candidates and a voter who casts a ballot:
>
> a > b > c > d
>
> but does not want to see either C or D win the election. It does not
> seem to me that the voter would be any better off if they had cast a
> ballot:
>
> a > b
>
> preventing the possibility of their ballot being used to increase the
> vote total for C.
>
> Which is then where the disincentive might come into play...the lower
> the vote total for a Candidate, the less of a mandate that candidate
> might believe they have...but is this enough of a reason to answer
> 'YES' to the question above?
>
> ----
> Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list
info
>
--__--__--
Message: 4
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 12:14:45 -0500
To: election-methods <election-methods at electorama.com>
From: Adam Tarr <atarr at purdue.edu>
Subject: Re: [EM] Primaries?
I don't think we really disagree about anything meaningful, Dave.
>>I imagine this is common, but they are really doing the primary on behalf
>>of the party. The party could decide to not have a primary, just as the
>>state could decide to not do the party the favor of administering it.
>About 100 years ago NY set up its system, in which primaries are done BY
>BOE on behalf of the PEOPLE.
>
>As to "party":
> Libertarians and Greens are national parties - this cuts NO ICE as to
> NY law.
> Groups willing and able to conform to NY law get the party privileges
> that make obeying desirable.
Right, this is what I mean by "[The government] could provide very strong
incentives". In the case of the Dems and Republicans, they've been in
power so long that the line between those parties and the government has
blurred a bit. They got in power and passed the laws which now benefit
their parties. But still, parties are private organizations, and the BoE
is a public institution, so the distinction still exists. If the Democrats
WANTED to use Condorcet in their primaries, they could just not use the
primary process and run their own primary.
> Libertarians are able to get above 15,000 signatures, but unable to
> get the 50,000 votes (about one percent) for governor to be recognized as
> a party.
> Greens became a party in 98, failed to get the 50,000 votes to
> continue in 02.
>They did a new thing - got a judge to direct BOE to continue to maintain
>party membership lists.
Obviously alternate election methods will help them enormously in getting
the votes they need.
>>>Anyway, big deal is that it is good for the voters to understand the
>>>method used, and that is more practical if both elections use the same
method.
>>
>>Probably true, but as I said before I wouldn't mind multiple winners, and
>>the goals of the elections are not exactly the same.
>One of my reasons for starting this series was that having ranked ballots
>in general elections removes one big reason for needing single winner
>primaries.
>
>Sorting out goals seems too big to solve here.
>
>>Well, when you said, "[If] a party is willing and able to move ahead -
>>let it", that implied to me that you thought the government had the right
>>to not let them.
>
>See my words above.
None of that really implies to me that they have the right to not let them
- just that they are providing really strong incentives for them to stick
to the current process.
I think that if you convinced one of the major parties to go with an
alternate election method, they would probably be able to force the BoE to
help them use it. Just speculation at this point, of course.
>>>>> Puzzle: Assuming the above leads to Condorcet in the primary,
>>>>> to select two candidates for the general election - WHY NOT? the
>>>>> arguments are not necessarily the same as related to electing two
>>>>> officers for PR.
>>>>
>>>>Not necessarily, sure, but I don't think that Condorcet is clearly the
>>>>best method to elect two candidates. It seems likely that it would end
>>>>up picking two candidates from the center of a party, and nobody from a
>>>>wing (think Kerry and Edwards, in stead of Kerry and Dean). But there
>>>>have been some stabs taken at Condorcet-flavored proportional
>>>>representation. The best attempt is probably this one:
>>>>http://groups.yahoo.com/group/election-methods-list/message/10308
>>>>It's pretty complicated, but worth the read. Try to sell that to the
>>>>public, though...
>>>
>>>As I said above, we are not doing PR, so almost certainly would not find
>>>such complication worth the pain.
>>
>>Probably not, but this does not imply that pure iterative single-winner
>>is the best approach, either. A good compromise (in my opinion) would be
>>the sequential variant of the method described in the link. So, first
>>you find the CW, then you find the best two-candidate slate with the CW
>>in it, then you find the best three-candidate slate with those two
>>candidates in it, and so on until you've generated as much of the order
>>as you need.
>You seem determined to add unneeded complications.
Well, there's complications, and there's unneeded complications. The
simple fact is that, while Condorcet is an excellent (I would say the best)
method for choosing one winner, it is a terrible method for choosing two or
more. It is likely to produce a set of "clone" candidates, all
representing the center faction of the electorate. Using some method of
PR, no matter how crude, is more likely to get good results.
I'll happily agree that sequential CFPRM is still really complicated, and
probably more complicated then we need. But how about single
non-transferrable vote? How about cumulative voting? How about STV-PR?
All of those are well-understood and relatively simple methods, and all
would be dramatically better than using Condorcet to elect two or three
people. As I said, I think Condorcet is the very best single-winner
method. But would a Democrat who supported Howard Dean or Dennis Kucinich
be happy if the two Democrats in the general election were Kerry and
Edwards? Because that would be the most likely outcome if you use
Condorcet.
We surely don't need perfect PR in a primary, but some degree of PR is
necessary, or producing more than one winner is often almost pointless.
-Adam
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