[EM] [ESF #1311] Re: The worst about each system; Approval Preferential Voting (new name for an MCA-like system)

[Jameson Quinn]

Abd, your avalanche of words makes it a losing battle to sort out the
fallacies from the gems, much less to respond to both. There are gems, but
no time. So, top fallacies:

2010/5/26 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd at lomaxdesign.com>

> At 01:45 PM 5/26/2010, Jameson Quinn wrote:
>
>
>  This method is very simple. I think that the description above, without
>> the parentheses, is simple and intuitive; it uses only concrete terms. It is
>> also very easy for a voter to sort candidates into three rankings; I'd argue
>> that this is the easiest possible ballot task, easier in general than either
>> two or four ranking categories. (Two means too many compromises, and four
>> means too many fine distinctions.)
>>
>>
>> The voters can easily not use them. Many didn't. This is overprotecting
>> voters, taking facility away from them in the name of .... what?
>>
>> In the name of reducing turkey-raising strategy to an absolute minimum.
>>
>
> Turkey raising is pretty stupid in a Range or Approval-like system, so one
> is cutting off good voting facility in favor of eliminating a foolish and
> almost certainly ineffective strategy. Again, in the name of .... what?


Even if your unsupported assertion that my answer is inadequate were true,
that would not make it not an answer.


>
>
>
>> First, I'd love to take full range data on the first election, defaulting
>> to 100/75/0 for preferred/approved/unapproved, to be analyzed by Range,
>> Condorcet, and Bucklin standards and published before the runoff. And the
>> runoff should allow approval-style write-ins, in case that analysis shows
>> that my method got it wrong somehow. So it's not about reducing
>> expressivity.
>>
>
> Hey, pretty close to my suggestion....
>

Your suggestion is not bad, for humans. However, for rational strategic
agents, it is nothing more a lot of complicated window dressing on approval;
an electorate purely made up of such agents would never use anything but the
top and unapproved ranks (and the unapproved ones besides the bottom rank,
only for turkey-raising). Since it is different for humans and for rational
strategic agents, normal people will be routinely voting unstrategically.
Those humans who are more strategic will have a (small) advantage in voting
power. This reduces legitimacy, if people realize it.

You can deny this and talk circles around me all you want; it doesn't change
this fact. I could easily be wrong about what system is better overall. But
I'd give you good odds on a bet that if we put some agents with your
heuristics into a simulation voting against agents with my heuristics, and
along with all the other factors there was one ideological dimension which
distinguished my voters from your voters, my ones would win on average.

>
>
>  But let's look at the overall strategy for APV:
>>
>> First off, if nobody ever uses the middle rank, it's just approval with a
>> runoff if there's no majority. That's a good system. It would, for instance,
>> have handled Clinton/Bush/Perot or Bush/Gore/Nader with nary a hiccup. But
>> in the recent Hawaii election, with two 30% clones who hate each other
>> against a 40% other, it would have gone into a runoff.
>>
> ...
>

>
> The supporters fo the 30% clones preferentially second rank each other's
> preference, even more likely in third rank in original Bucklin, because it
> gives them more chance for the favorite to win, expressing stronger
> preference.
>

That's an optical illusion, at best a valuable one if it tricks some human
voters into using the third rank in a strategically-invalid way which helps
the social utility of the outcome. See above.

...why I suggest that voting examples give preference strength (i.e.,
> sincere Range) data....
>

Some of us prefer brevity. I gave a real-world example. You want sincere
Range data, go look up the small-donor fundraising details (etc.) in Hawaii.

You've set up two contadictory assumptions: clones, but their followers
> don't vote for the other clone.
>

Maybe you should read your next sentence.


> Those aren't clones in any ordinary sense, only in a technical sense that
> ranks them together because they are both preferred to C, by a set of
> voters.
>

Wow, thanks for telling me what I just said. If you got it, then I said
enough.


>
>   One big yuck. Approval with runoffs needs a runoff to decide, and the
>> true Condorcet winner might not actually be in the runoff, so the election
>> might go to the true second-place winner. Two small yucks.
>>
>> How do you encourage voters to include additional rankings so as to avoid
>> a runoff in this situation? Standard Bucklin certainly does not do the
>> trick; the same
>> damned-if-I'll-cancel-out-my-own-vote-by-also-voting-for-the-second-frontrunner
>> logic applies exactly as much in the second ranking as it did in the first!
>> My later-minimum harm takes away this strong reason for A and B voters not
>> to extend their approval. But they still have no particular positive reason
>> to do so.
>>
>
> You think that this logic applies.
>

It does.


> Most voters did not follow that logic!
>

Replace "most" with "some", and that's obvious. As stated, it's unproven and
dubious.

You have also removed from Bucklin a device that real voters actually used
> to express maximum preference strength, to give their favorite the best
> chance to win in the primary: skipping second rank.
>

Optical illusion. Seriously, do you want to make the bet I offered above?
I'll lay $100 against your $50.


> [...]
>
>> ...
>>
>> That brings us, finally, to the issue of turkey-raising. That is the
>> reason for restricting to three ranks. If you let people make fine
>> distinctions "for free", that is, with essentially no effect on a
>> first-round winner and only affecting who makes it into the runoff, then
>> that's basically begging people to think about turkey-raising. (BTW, Abd,
>> that's the problem with your idea of having distinctions among unapproved
>> candidates on a Bucklin ballot.)
>>
>
> I don't see it as a problem. I see those voting turkey-raising as, often,
> getting what they deserve: a result they don't like. The distinctions I
> suggested are only used to add, possibly, a third candidate to the runoff.
>

False. As you stated, they could add or change the second and/or third
candidate. They have an impact on both Condorcet and Range.


> So you think they will turkey-raise for that? That's fine, but it could
> very easily backfire.
>

That's fine? Not if I'm their neighbor.


> Runoffs are notorously hard to predict. That "turkey" might turn out to
> have a constituency that didn't even vote in the primary because they
> thought it would be useless. Get the candidate into the runoff, the
> situation flips. And, presumably, your goal as a turkey raiser in this case
> would be to get your two favorites into the runoff, not the real opposition.
> But your favorites may be perceived as front-runners then, and their
> supporters may stay home, thinking that it's a done deal. Boy, could they be
> surprised!
>
> They got what they voted for.
>
> This whole concept of hobbling voters so that they can't "do bad things" is
> completely backwards. Trust the voters! Give them tools to express their
> preferences, accurately. Then make the method *reasonably* strategy-proof.
> Remember, Bucklin is basically approval, and we are just adding some tweaks
> to deal with unusual situations: multiple majorities, perhaps, or, more
> likely, majority failure, as well as the ability to detect a Condorcet
> winner. And then, if these choices do need to be made -- which is unusual!
> -- a runoff.
>

Another bet: my system would lead to fewer runoffs than yours, with human
voters OR rational agents. I'd put money and odds, but the human voters part
is hard to test. So a proxy bet: if we put money on this, and use a random
sample of 7 EM posters as judges, and figure out a way to get all the
selected judges to respond (including "I don't know" but not "I don't
care"), I'll win. I can't give you 2:1 odds there, but I would happily bet
$50 at even odds.


>  In my system, however, where would people raise a turkey? By voting for
>> them as favorites? Besides going against human nature, this is extremely
>> dangerous; it is likely to elect the turkey outright or to knock your
>> favored candidate out of the runoff. By approving them? Again, this is a
>> self-limiting strategy. For it to matter, it must mean that there is a
>> runoff; but then, the more it's used, the more likely it is to simply elect
>> the turkey outright. (It would be safe if there were expected to be one or
>> more majorities and no runoff; but then it would be irrelevant.)
>>
>
> By the way, you might notice in my sequence of suggested reforms, that the
> first reform is simply Bucklin, 3-rank, and even the allowance of equal
> ranking in first and second rank is a minor extension, it fixes certain
> problems. It makes it *easier* to vote *sincerely*, not harder.
>
>  **Yes, I could have used a Condorcet logic to resolve the multiple
>> majority, as I did to decide who goes to the runoff. It would even have made
>> this method satisfy the Condorcet criterion for honest voters. But I think
>> that multiple majorities will be rare, and that when they happen, top
>> preferences and Condorcet will give the same answer, so I went with the
>> option that simplifies explanations and rapid counts.
>>
>
> The first implementation would not have, I'd assume, Condorcet analysis as
> part of the method. Range analysis is easy, just add up the votes, assigning
> them values. Condorcet analysis requires more work, though since it only
> needs to be a test against the straight Bucklin and/or Range winner, it
> isn't bad.
>
>
>
>  It's not quite the same as MCA or any other Bucklin system, since if there
>> are two approval majorities, the preferences, not the approvals, break the
>> tie. This makes APV more lesser-no-harm-like than Bucklin, encouraging
>> voters not to truncate.
>>
>>
>> Not a tie, Jameson. Multiple majorities, quite a different things.
>>
>>
>> How do you say it, then? "Break the multiple majority"? "Decide the
>> multiple majority"? "Decide the issue"? "Resolve the multiple majority"? I
>> guess the latter, but we should agree on terminology. I was trying to use
>> "tiebreak" as the right verb here, but you're right, it's imprecise.
>>
>
> Just understand that there is already established precedent for resolving
> multiple majorities: the choice with the most Yes votes. The described
> breakdown of this method, where a 51% majority defeats what could be 100%
> approval, is a clue. Once 100% approval data has been collected, there would
> be a cry of outrage from the 49% that just got aced out, and, my guess, some
> of the 51% would have said, "this isn't what we intended."
>
>
>  As was pointed out, this rule (if multiple majority, the highest
>> first-preference vote prevails) leads to proposterous conclusions, i.e, to
>> make it completely extreme, one candidate has 51% approval, but leads in
>> first preferences (say it's a plurality, and this can be quite small,
>> overall), and the other has 100% approval, but the 51% candidate wins,
>> through the rule about first preferences.
>>
>>
>> Yes but:
>>
>> In reality, multiple majorities were rare with Bucklin, the problem tends
>> to be in the reverse direction, no majority even after all rounds are
>> collapsed.
>>
>>
>> Exactly! This system is designed to best resolve the common case -
>> encourage majorities by not encouraging truncation - and not the rare case
>> of multiple majorities. It's a trade-off.
>>
>
> But a trade-off for what?


To "encourage majorities by not encouraging truncation". The later-harm of
Bucklin encourages using only the top rank.

Multiple majorities *did* occur; my sense is that they probably became rarer
> as people learned how to vote more effectively (which doesn't mean that the
> early results were poor, but if you are getting multiple majorities, it
> probably means that people were too-rapidly lowering their approval cutoff.
> The poor simulations of Bucklin were defective because it was assumed that
> the voters would simply rank, instead of understanding that Bucklin ballots
> are really range ballots and effective strategy is to vote them that way
> (but it's a little more complicated than that. The ballots are normalized
> within the approved class, and how the approval cutoff is determined is
> another question.)
>
>
>  As mentioned above, using a condorcet analysis of the three-rank ballots
>> to resolve majorities, with first preferences only as a fallback, would
>> resolve your issue. I like that system; it's better theoretically than the
>> one I proposed. But while you can hide the rules for getting into a runoff
>> in parentheses, you can't hide the rules for an outright win there.
>> Basically, I came down on the side of having a simple three-sentence
>> description, with all concrete terms; and of making the one-round-win
>> calculable with any vote-counting technology on the planet. (On the other
>> hand, an election-night announcement that "there will be a runoff, it will
>> probably be between X and Y but we'll tell you for sure who's in it in two
>> days" is something most people could live with.)
>>
>> My own solution to the multiple majority problem is different and more
>> comprehensive, without creating this preposterous conclusion of rejecting a
>> candidate clearly approved by all the voters, in favor of one who might be
>> quite divisive.
>>
>>
>> Your solution also requires a course in voting theory to even explain,
>> much less understand. I support it nonetheless. Do you support mine?
>>
>
> Not comparatively. If it were on a ballot question, probably. Would depend
> on context.
>
> I don't mind if a course in voting theory is needed to figure out what the
> best system for a jurisdiction is. (It can vary!). I do mind if a course in
> voting theory is needed to vote a good, reasoanbly strategic ballot.
>

Depending on your definition of "reasonably", I bet your system fails. For
similar values of "reasonably", I bet mine still passes. This is testable.

...

Sorry to get a little snappy. I've seen several people tell you they'd
prefer it if you were less loquacious, and nobody say the reverse. I think
you should consider this fact.

JQ
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