[EM] Re: why ranking should be allowed for approved candidates only

[Araucaria Araucana]

Russ Paielli <6049awj02 <at> sneakemail.com> writes:
> 
> Araucaria Araucana araucaria.araucana-at-gmail.com |EMlist| wrote:
> > On 17 Apr 2005 at 14:28 UTC-0700, Russ Paielli wrote:
> 
> >>By only allowing the approved candidates to be approved, we can
> >>significantly simplify the procedure for both the voter *and* the
> >>equipment manufacturer. And we can do so at very little "cost" in
> >>terms of voting "expressibility." If you are serious about actually
> >>getting a new voting system adopted, I urge you to reconsider
> >>allowing ranking of unapproved candidates.
> > 
> > 
> > Hi Russ,
> > 
> > The strategic ability to rank below the cutoff is what enables 
> > DMC/RAV
> > to discourage defection cases like this:
> > 
> >    27: A>>B
> >    24: B (truncates >A preference)
> >    49: C
> > 
> > Without that strategic disincentive, voters in this election might
> > simply bullet vote and you end up with C.
> 
> For the votes you show, I figure that DMC/RAV picks C. If ranking of 
> unapproved candidates is disallowed and the 27 A>>B votes are changed to 
> just A, then C still wins. If we start with your votes and change the 24 
> B votes to B>A, then A wins. If we start with the A>>B votes changed to 
> A, then change the B votes to B>A, A wins.
> 
> I must be missing your point. According to my tallies for the four 
> variations mentioned above, it makes no difference whether the 27 A>>B 
> votes are changed to A only or vice versa. It is true that if the 24 B 
> votes are "untruncated" to B>A, that gives the election to A. But so 
> what? If A was the B voters *approved* second choice, they shouldn't be 
> overly disappointed. What did I miss?

C wins any which way because A voters put the approval cutoff above B to
discourage defection.

If B voters don't want C to win, they must not truncate to create a cycle.  
That is the anti-defection strategy (on A's part) I'm talking about.  It's
sort of like a poison pill.

DMC/RAV is the simplest summable voting method to discourage this kind of
defection.  But it works ONLY with an approval cutoff.

> 
> > If the ballot has to be simplified, 3 approved + 2 disapproved ranks
> > are pretty simple.  This allows a voter to rank 3 choices as
> 
> I don't care for ballots that have arbitrary restrictions on how many 
> candidates can be approved or disapproved or arbitrary conventions about 
> which candidates are approved or disapproved. I also think that such 
> arrangements will inevitably lead to confusion.
> 
> Granted, even if we only allow the approved candidates to be ranked, we 
> will still have some confusion, but it just seems more "natural" and 
> intuitive to me. Think of it as a generalization of Approval voting: you 
> only select the approved candidates, except that now you can rank them 
> too if you wish.
> 
> By the way, if you don't wish to rank them you can make them all equal. 
> Then your vote will have the same effect it would have in Approval. If 
> you think Approval is a good method, how can you complain about that?

I'm well aware that equal ranking is possible.  I'm not satisfied with
approval alone because it loses preference information.  "Just good enough"
is the enemy of the great.

> 
> >     1 2 3
> >     1 2 4
> >     1 4 5
> > 
> > to move up the approval cutoff.  Or as grades,
> > 
> >    A B C
> >    A B F
> >    A D F
> 
> I don't like grading schemes either. They just don't seem right to me 
> for public elections.

It isn't necessary to have limited ranks or fixed cutoffs at all.

Say that OCR is used to read filled in ordinal ranks, with large boxes
that the voter fills in with big numbers:

        +---+  +---+  +---+
        | 0 |  | 0 |  | 1 |
        +---+  +---+  +---+
        +---+  +---+  +---+
        | 0 |  | 0 |  | 2 |
        +---+  +---+  +---+
        +---+  +---+  +---+
        | 0 |  | 0 |  | 3 |
        +---+  +---+  +---+


Just like the 1040EZ hand-written tax form (at least the version from a few
years back.

Add an extra "Minimum Rank Approved" candidate to each race, and you get the
approval cutoff with no extra software -- just use the votes vs. MRA to fin
the approval scores.  If no vote for MRA are entered, all ranked choices are
approved.

Machine reading would be adequate for 95-99% of the ballots, the remainder
could be entered by hand.

Machine assisted ballots are also easy -- you could use a PDF form for the
election that would be printed out and not saved.  Only the paper ballot
would be counted.

-- 
monkeypuzzle