[EM] Election Day causes stress

[Jameson Quinn]

I agree with Kristofer. Minor points:

 Ranking methods only require deciding which candidate is better, while
>> range also asks how much and for voter to be understood when expressing
>> that "much".
>>
>
> If I remember correctly, the Majority Judgement paper makes that point
> when it says that for the method to work well, the voters should have a
> common conception of what "Poor" or "Good" means in terms of rating. The
> authors suggest using named ratings (like Poor and Good, or A/B/C/D/E/F)


That would be A/B/C/D/F, unless you went to Harvard. Actually, I'd suggest
A+/A/B/C/D/F; that way, the MJ tiebreaker effectively gives each candidate
a grade from the set (A+,A,A-,B+,B-,C+,C-,D+,D-,F). (If there's still a
tie, it can be resolved; in effect, some plusses or minuses are bigger than
others).

Balinski and Laraki actually suggest a set of 6 word grades (literally
translated to Excellent, Very Good, Good, etc.) which are used in the
French school system. I think each country should use grades from its
school system, which are most likely to be commonly-understood. If the
school grades are numeric, I don't have a common prescription. In Mexico,
grades are supposedly 0-10, but in reality they are 5-10 so I'd use that as
the scale.

instead of numbers to better make use of these common conceptions or
> standards when they do exist.
>
> We could thus consider three kinds of ballots: first, the labeled rated
> ballot, like MJ, where the question is "according to a common standard,
> what grade would you give X, Y, and Z?"; second, a numeric rated ballot,
> where the question is "how many points do you give X, Y, and Z, considering
> the tradeoffs between awarding points to each of the candidates?"; and
> third, a ranked ballot that just asks "Who do you want to win? Who do you
> want to win if you can't have the first one? Who do you want to win if you
> can't have the first two?" etc.
>

Yes. And I think it's clear that, of these three ballot types, the first is
the easiest to vote, because you can take each candidate as a separate
question. Moreover, the first also gives (in theory, assuming continuous
grades) the most information. An absolute rated ballot can be normalized
into a numeric rated ballot or sorted into a ranked ballot, but not vice
versa. Thus, to me it's clear that the absolute rated ballot is the ideal;
and median-based systems like MJ are the only ones I know of which use such
a ballot.


>
> The advantage of considering each ballot type to be answers to a certain
> type of question is that one can ask how well a method behaves with respect
> to the ballots. If each ballot type only is defined in context of the
> method with which it is associated, then every method is perfect from its
> own point of view. I think I've seen this kind of reasoning elsewhere, e.g.
> that IRV is a good method because the ballots specify contingency programs,
> not "who would I prefer to have win" type answers, and therefore, IRV
> faithfully follows the programs given by the voters, giving results
> entirely consistent with the programs.
>

Dividing methods into sets by ballot types helps if we decide that one
ballot type is better than another. I don't think that it's particularly
useful to compare other aspects of systems only within the set, though. In
other words, at best there is a right answer for a given set of voters, not
a right answer for a given set of ballots.

Jameson
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