[EM] [RangeVoting] Re: Range Voting As an Issue

[Jameson Quinn]

If I understand Robert correctly, I think that his concern is to find
whichever system gets good results, while still leaving the voters' job
crystal-clear.  In particular, the first priority would be to find a system
which puts the minimum burden of strategic thinking on the voter. Insofar as
it's consistent with this first priority, his other priorities are to
simplify the ballot and to elect a better winner.

He says that he finds Condorcet to beat Range, Approval, IRV, and Plurality
on those priorities. I can't say I disagree. There is no question that the
average voter can get away with less strategizing under Condorcet than under
any of those systems. Range and Approval both give significantly more power
to a voter who can correctly guess which two candidates are the
frontrunners; and a conscientious voter simply can't leave it up to the law
of averages to balance out that power between themself and those crazies on
the other side. And IRV and Plurality both require lesser-evil thinking and
favorite betrayal, which is worse.

But I would contend that, just as clearly, both Majority Judgment and SODA
beat Condorcet by these criteria. These are two very-different systems, so
I'll tackle them separately.

Why is Majority Judgment easier on the voter than Condorcet? First and
foremost, because rating is easier than ranking. You can express this
computationally, by saying that ranking requires O(n²) pairwise comparisons
of candidates (or perhaps for some autistic savants who heap-sort in their
head, O[n log(n)]), while rating requires O(n) comparisons of candidates
against an absolute scale. You can express it empirically; this has been
confirmed by ballot spoilage rates, speed, and self-report in study after
study. You can look at the trend of websites - Yelp, IMDB, Amazon, and an
interminable etc., all use ratings. HotOrNot explicitly experimented with
FaceMash-style comparisons and found that even a single two-way comparison
was harder for users than ratings.

Second, MJ has, if anything, less of a strategic incentive than Condorcet.
Balinski and Laraki found that, in a simulation seeded by real polled
ballots from the 2007 French presidential election, the MJ result was more
likely to be stable under strategy than the Condorcet result. Warren Smith
has argued that, if you know who the two frontrunners are, a Condorcet
burial strategy is essentially risk-free, while saving cognitive effort. In
MJ, on the other hand, chances are that your honest vote is already getting
all possible benefits from such a strategy.

The last two paragraphs may seem counterintuitive to people who are used to
thinking of ratings ballots in Range terms. That's because, in Range, some
amount of strategic thinking is almost totally inevitable. It would be
ridiculous to mark a Range ballot by simply rating each candidate on an
absolute scale, without normalizing so that you marked at least one max and
one min vote. And voting power continues to increase as you move towards an
approval-style ballot. With MJ, on the other hand, even a non-normalized
vote with no max or min ratings could well have full strategic voting
power.

As to ballot simplicity, it's partly a matter of taste. I'd say that MJ has
the edge over Condorcet, but you might disagree. Of course, it would be
possible to do Condorcet with a rated ballot, but since I don't know anyone
who seriously advocates that, I'm neglecting that possibility.

For results, I think that MJ and Condorcet both do more than well enough. Is
it better to have the candidate who makes some majority happiest, as in MJ,
or the one who has majorities over all the others, as in Condorcet? On
principle, it's hard to say. In the end, I definitely sympathize with Warren
that BR is the best measure of results (while disagreeing that results
should be the end-all criterion). I haven't seen BR results for MJ, but
based on its similarity to Range and MCA, I'd suspect MJ clearly beats
Condorcet by this measure.

If you want to read more about MJ, the place to start are the papers
on Laraki's
home page <http://sites.google.com/site/ridalaraki/majority-judgment>. These
are pro-MJ papers, but honestly, I've found that I got more understanding
even of MJ's flaws from reading these critically, than I did from reading
the couple of shoddy anti-MJ papers that you'll find in a Google scholar
search.

....

As to SODA, the case is also clear. Less need for strategic thinking than
Condorcet? Check. Simpler ballots? In spades. Good results? If voting blocs
tend to be well-defined so that voters agree with their favorite candidates
— not too excessive an assumption in an ideological, partisan election —
then the CW will win in SODA more often than in Condorcet! That is to say,
honesty will be the strategic equilibrium in SODA, and lead to a CW win; but
in Condorcet, strategy could confound this. In practice, I think that the
only case where the CW will not win SODA is when they're an
relatively-unknown centrist. Such a person can become the CW precisely
because voters do not know their flaws; but in SODA, the other candidates
will evaluate that person much more carefully before they transfer a winning
pile of votes to an unknown.

....

I've been actively interested in voting systems for going on two decades
now, and sometimes it's frustrating. We continue to argue amongst ourselves
between system A and system B, we continue to invent new system Z, while the
rest of the world basically ignores us.

In that time, it seems as if I've favored everything under the sun. If I
remember correctly, I've gone from Borda, to IRV, to Condorcet, to Range, to
Approval, to Asset, to Bucklin, to Bucklin-which-I-called-MCA, to MJ, back
to Approval, to SODA. So I think I can pretty fairly say that I'm not
fixated on any one system. I also think that I understand the arguments in
favor of different systems.

And I honestly have more hope on this issue right now than I have for some
time. SODA could be the winning combo. Yes, perhaps I'm biased, because I
helped invent it. But if you look at that list of what I've supported, you
won't see any other systems where I'd done more than minor tweaks around the
edges. And that's not for lack of opportunity; I've invented many systems of
my own. It's because I always wanted to back a system which had other
supporters, because we're not going to accomplish anything each working
alone.

What's so great about SODA? I think it would entirely liberate voters from
having to think about strategy. I know that it is the simplest possible task
for the voter. And I expect that it would give great results. These are R
B-J's three criteria, as I understand them, and I agree with them. I know
that other people here might put them in a different order; for instance,
the Range advocates would probably put results (that is, BR) first.

SODA has problems, too. It's an obscure system invented yesterday. And it
doesn't even really lend itself to publishable results; it's hard to prove
anything about it or even do a monte-carlo simulation without making
questionable assumptions about how much or how little voting blocs agree
with their favored candidate. Finally, it cannot work unless the candidates
are human beings; it can't evaluate options without attaching them to
spokespeople. But those problems are can be addressed, one way or another,
with enough time and effort.

I'd still enthusiastically vote for almost any reform to Plurality -
certainly any of the systems except Borda that I listed as having supported.
But I have hope that EM researchers and advocates can start coming together
as we never have before. I'm not saying that everyone will agree with me. I
wouldn't even want for debate to stop. But I think that now is the time to
start laying the first foundations of a new unity, and if you ask me right
now, SODA has the strength to be the cornerstone.

I hope this does not sound too arrogant. Certainly, I am humbled by the many
tasks before us. And no matter how rousingly optimistic my rhetoric,
experience reminds me that getting even two of us to agree on anything is
always harder than you think.

But still; I remain:

Hopefully y'rs,
Jameson Quinn

2011/8/4 robert bristow-johnson <rbj at audioimagination.com>

>
>  On Aug 4, 2011, at 3:20 AM, bob wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> --- In RangeVoting at yahoogroups.com, "thenewthirdparty"
>>> <thenewthirdparty at ...> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Guys and Gals,
>>>> I now see Range Voting as a very important component to getting third
>>>> parties elected.  But I don't see how the Range Voting group will ever
>>>> change the minds of the public in order for it to be a reality.
>>>>
>>>
> and they haven't changed my mind about it, even though i'm not opposed to
> election policy reform nor of moving past FPP.  i fully recognize why the
> simple vote-for-one ballot (either FPP or delayed-top-two-runoff)
> disadvantages third-party and independent candidates.
>
> this was a point i brought up during in Burlington IRV debate:  one of the
> vocal opponents to IRV was, 3 years previously, a minor candidate for mayor
> in Burlington Vermont.  i would almost say a non-serious candidate, but he
> got on the ballot (his name is Loyal Ploof).  now he lost to the Prog
> candidate who was elected in 2006 and he was a sorta anti-establishment
> rabble rouser (if he could get a rabble).
>
> now (i told them this), suppose i'm standing in the rabble and Loyal says
> something that we all sorta know but the contending candidates aren't gonna
> bring up and i hear it and i say "yeah, right!  Loyal's right!"  maybe even
> he's a largely single-issue candidate, maybe not.  but i want to send a
> message to city hall by voting for Loyal but the election between the real
> contenders might be close and my two-party contingency candidate may need my
> vote.  so Loyal doesn't get it, because even if i agree with him and *want*
> to vote for him, i dare not.
>
> it's the typical Spoiler problem, that discourages voting for third-party
> or independent candidates.  if they can never sufficient vote (because the
> race between credible candidates may be close) third parties cannot get off
> the ground and become contenders.  but i was surprized that this guy who
> would directly benefit from a ranked ballot would be opposed to it.  (he
> didn't like the Prog mayor and essentially jumped in the boat with the other
> Prog-haters that believed, falsely, that IRV specifically favored the Progs
> in Burlington.)
>
> that said, and to repeat that i also understand IRV to have *failed* in
> Burlington in 2009, i am not at all impressed with Range or Score voting for
> governmental elections (for certain Olympic sports, sure, but not for
> governmental elections).  one of the complaints we have against both FPP and
> IRV (as we found out in Burlington in 2009) is placing obvious burdens of
> tactical voting on the electorate.  we don't *like* having to forsake our
> favorite candidate in order to accomplish some other political imperative.
>  FPP discourages the Nader voters from voting for their favorite candidate
> in 2000 by punishing them when it became clear that their vote cause Bush to
> be elected.  and IRV discourages the GOP Prog-haters in Burlington from
> voting for their favorite candidate in 2009 when they discover that marking
> their favorite as #1 on the ballot actually caused the Prog to win.
>
> now, it's not the ranked ballot that failed these voters, it was the
> Hare-STV method of tabulating the vote. Condorcet would have taken the same
> ballot data and elected the candidate that was preferred by the electorate
> over any other specific candidate.  The GOP who lost the most in the
> election would neither have gotten punished for their sincere 1st-choice
> vote (if IRV had survived, in 2012 these guys would be saying to themselves
> in the polls: "I gotta choose between Liberal and More-Liberal, because if I
> vote for the guy I really like, More-Liberal gets elected"), they would have
> been more satisfied with the Condorcet winner than with the IRV winner, who
> was their least favorite.  And the Progs would have been more satisfied with
> the Condorcet winner than with the apparent FPP winner (the GOP), but they
> would be unhappy with the result due to rivalry the Progs and Dems have for
> the common liberal voter in this town.
>
> Ranked-choice voting requires less strategizing by the voter than Range
> because it requires less information.  with a ranked ballot, all the voter
> needs to decide is who, in every contingency that matters to the voter, who
> he or she would vote for.  they don't need to decide how much *more* they
> like Mother Teresa over Ghandi.  If they really want to bury a third
> candidate, Stalin, they have to sacrifice their preference between the two
> virtuous and the election might be decided between them.  Or maybe the
> election will turn out to be a battle between Stalin and Satan and they
> might rather live under Stalin than Satan, so they want to bump him up a
> little (leave Satan with a score of 0).  but what if Satan wins because not
> enough voters scored Stalin up enough?  or what if either Teresa or Ghandi
> lose to Stalin because too many voters scored Stalin too high (for fear of
> electing Satan)?
>
> what to do?  what to do?
>
> but a ranked ballot is easy:
>
>      Teresa > Ghandi > Stalin > Satan
>
> or, if you're more Hindu than Christian:
>
>      Ghandi > Teresa > Stalin > Satan
>
> no tactical thinking necessary for the ranked ballot when it decided by
> Condorcet and a Condorcet winner exists.  and, if a CW exists, the result is
> perfectly consistent, in every contingency, with the simple-majority, two
> candidate, one-person-one-vote election that everyone is familiar with.
>
>
>   Does someone have thoughts on how to get your Range Voting plan voted
>>>> into action?  I would like to hear how Range Voting moves beyond more than
>>>> just a good idea.
>>>>
>>>
> how does it move beyond "good idea" when it hasn't advanced to that square?
>  (sorry Warren, i *really* have a lot of respect for you and your
> scholarship and your Burlington IRV page at your website, but you're still
> not convincing regarding Range.  a little more convincing regarding
> Approval, but i would still not support that for political office, maybe the
> judiciary or some boards, but not executive nor legislative.)
>
> listen, everybody agrees with how a simple 2-candidate election should be
> decided: person with the most votes wins and every voters vote is of equal
> value.  "simple majority" and "one-person-one-vote".
>
> wouldn't it make a lot more sense, since IRV is discredited, and FPP is
> clearly flawed, to put your energy into educating people about what goes
> wrong and *has* gone wrong in those elections and present an alternative
> with ballot no more complicated than with IRV and truer to the hypothetical
> 2-person race, whether the spoiler runs or not?
>
>
>  I think we need to start a PAC or even maybe a party that has the sole
>>> objective of getting rid of plurality voting.
>>>
>>
> doesn't one exist?  why not team up with FairVote?
>
>
>   We need to be able to communicate that competitive elections in which
>>> there is no vote splitting is the most important thing we can do to hold
>>> politicians accountable.
>>>
>>
> sure, and how does Condorcet cause vote splitting?  you don't need Range to
> address the problem of splitting the majority vote.
>
>
>   We also need to be willing to vote for candidates who support getting rid
>>> of plurality regardless of what other positions that candidate holds.
>>>
>> oooh, i dunno if i can handle that.  weirder things have happened than
> that of Michelle Bachmann supporting ranked-choice voting.  i wouldn't vote
> for her even if she *loved* Condorcet.
>
>
>  We need to communicate that once we get over this hump, we will no longer
>>> have to worry about having to vote for the lesser of two evils ever again.
>>>
>>> Another thing we can do is email and tweet news hosts like Rachael Maddow
>>> and ask them to do a segment on different voting systems.  If we organize to
>>> tweet pundits at the same time, maybe they'll get the message.
>>>
>>
> dunno who Rachel Maddow is.  guess i better google her.  how about Chris
> Matthews?
>
>
>
> On 8/4/11 9:16 PM, Dave Ketchum wrote:
>
>> Here I talk of moving up from FPP to Range or Condorcet.  I do not get
>> into other single-winner elections or into multi-winner elections - while
>> such deserve considering, they distract from my primary goal, which is to
>> promote moving upward without getting buried in details.
>>
>> Voters should see advantages in moving up to a better method.
>>
>> To vote for one, as in FPP:
>> .     In Range, assign your choice a maximum rating.
>> .     In Condorcet, simply rank your choice.
>>
>>  which is simpler?
>
>
>  Voting for two is using more power than FPP offers.  Often there is a
>> major pair of candidates for which you prefer one, and one other that you
>> also want to vote for:  For your second choice you could give the same rank
>> or rating, or lower:
>> .     In Range you assign first choice maximum rating.  Unrated share
>> minimum.  The farther you rate second below max, the stronger your vote for
>> max over second.  BUT, the nearer you rate second to unrated, the weaker you
>> rate second over unrated.
>> .     In Condorcet, rank your first choice higher than your second.
>>
>>  ditto.
>
>
>  Voting for more is doable:
>> .     In Range your difference in rating between any two is how much you
>> prefer the higher over the lower, and the sum of these differences decides
>> which wins their race.
>> .     In Condorcet they count how many rank A>B vs how many rank B>A.
>>
> which meaning complies more with equal weighting of each voter's vote (what
> we normally mean by "one-person-one-vote")?
>
>
>  Politicians may hesitate in moving up to more powerful methods.  Range or
>> Condorcet can cost more, but getting a truer reading as to voter choices can
>> be worth the pain.
>>
>
> i'm sorry, guys.  i'm really sorry, Warren, but between Condorcet and
> Range, it just ain't close.
>
> --
>
> r b-j                  rbj at audioimagination.com
>
> "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
>
>
>
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
>
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