[EM] Student government - what voting system to recommend?

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 10:10 AM 4/25/2007, Howard Swerdfeger wrote:


>Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
>>At 06:41 PM 4/24/2007, Juho wrote:
>  >>> If you vote Approval style, you fail to express your true
>>>>appreciation of the candidates, and this can backfire.
>>>Yes, but typically/statistically Approval strategy improves the outcome.
>>No. Check out Warren's simulations. Sincere voting (which means 
>>expressing weak preferences as weak votes) produces the best 
>>outcomes. Approval style produces acceptable outcomes, relative to 
>>some other methods.
>
>You are making assumptions about what is "best".

Sure. And you aren't?

The assumption made in my understanding of the simulations is that 
the "best" winner is the one with the highest total vote in *sincere* 
Range. To explain in detail what "sincere" vote means in this case 
might be worth stating. I don't know the extent to which my 
definition would match what Warren used.

To find the sincere range vote for a voter, one would start with a 
distribution of voters in an issue space designed to resemble actual 
distributions. It doesn't have to be perfect, just a reasonable 
approximation of how view vary in a large population. Then the 
candidates would be placed in the same issue space, randomly. For 
each voter, the distance -- there is some controversy over whether to 
use Manhattan distance or direct distance -- is determined for each 
candidate. The minimum distance is rated max and the maximum distance 
is rated max. And then the others would be placed as they fall in 
this relationship.

Obviously, there are ways in which such a simulation could vary from 
reality. But I haven't seen anything better. One further refinement 
would be to assign importance factors for the issues, which would 
vary with the voters. It's a task all its own.... and worth doing, 
I'd suggest, wish I had time.

>On a side note: I still have not found the definition of the 
>Individual Utility Function used in the simulations talked about at 
>'rangevoting.org'.
>I am willing to accept there Society Utility function as the Sum of 
>Individual Utilities. Did they use U(v, c) = 1/R? Or did they use 
>something else? how does the choice of the Utility function affect 
>the simulation results.

Warren has published his code and has invited others to vary how it 
is used, or to substitute their own functions. And I'm quite sure 
he'd be happy to put up, on the Range site, anything reasonable. He 
really is looking for optimum simulations, not merely simulations 
that show Range as being better!

>>That actually doesn't happen easily under Range (the latter). 
>>Basically, the most "efficient" strategy for winning is to get as 
>>many of your supporters as possible to bullet-vote for you. 
>>However, this can backfire, if you offend those who might otherwise 
>>like you but consider your recommendation that you vote against 
>>your favorite to be quite offensive. I know it would offend me!
>
>Then how do you explain Voting cards!
>http://www.australianpolitics.com/images/qld/2001-htv-cook.jpg
>They are the an emergence of candidates telling voters how to vote.

The answer is so obvious that I won't bother. Hint: the context must 
be considered, and the fact that many voters won't be familiar with 
the range of candidates available. And what I noted was the effect 
that offensive recommendations would have.... Plus this is the STV 
context, which is a different animal entirely than what we have been 
discussing.

Swerdfeger left a huge amount of quoted text at the end with no 
comment, which is offensive. I've done it myself, but only as an 
error, somehow I had managed to push it off-screen, with blank lines, 
and then forgot to check for it. But there weren't blanks.... still, 
perhaps it was simply inadvertent....