[EM] SODA unfairly hobbles nonparanoid voters.

[Jameson Quinn]

SODA was initially designed as a single-winner system. I believe that as
such, it has four independent advantages, three of which are unmatched by
any other good system.

1. It is the easiest possible system for voters. No spoiled ballots, bullet
voting works, and no need to defensively strategize.
2. It is "later-no-harm" enough to satisfy political incumbents who don't
want to be defeated by centrist nonentities. (This is also true of IRV, but
IRV has other problems)
3. It resolves the chicken problem better than any other system I know of.
4. I believe it would give good results overall - like Approval, Condorcet,
MJ, or Range.

So if you are thinking of SODA as just being Asset shoehorned into a
single-winner case, then you don't understand the motivation, and either you
don't understand the system or I don't.

JQ

2011/9/5 ⸘Ŭalabio‽ <Walabio at macosx.com>

>        2011-09-05T09:28:14Z, “Jameson Quinn” <Jameson.Quinn at Gmail.Com>:
>
>        0thly, I recommend that you read this article:
>
>
> http://web.archive.org/web/20080113211450/http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/2000/06/14/quoting.html
>
> >       Basically, ⸘Ŭalabio‽'s objection is that SODA does not allow
> non-bullet votes to be delegable. The reason that SODA is designed that way
> is not "paranoia", as ⸘Ŭalabio‽ claims, but rather simplicity.
>
>         Simplicity is in the eye of the beholder.  What is simple for me is
> choosing people whom I trust to represent my interests in the
> Asset-Negotiations and leave them to their work.  If some of them screw me
> during Asset-Negotiations, I shall never vote for the bad 1s again.  As far
> as simplicity goes, SODA seems more complex to me than Asset-Voting.
>
> >       To see why multiple delegable votes would be confusing, consider
> the following scenario. Let us say that I vote for A and B. After the votes
> are counted, it turns out that all the other voters voted for X or Y, in a
> 50/50 proportion. My delegated vote could be decisive. But A approves X, and
> B approves Y. So both of these approvals are added to my delegated vote,
> which ends up being useless in deciding between X and Y.
>
>         Either A or B would eventually by won over to the other side by
> policy-concessions.
>
> >       Also, making multiply-delegated votes possible would entirely ruin
> SODA's summability. This would make a number of useful anti-fraud measures
> impossible, including precinct-level counting, sampled count audits, and
> voter-auditable cryptographic ballot receipts like those of
> heliosvoting.org.
>
>         Just make the allowable votes a fixed number.  This is required in
> 1 form or another in proportional systems.  Indeed, most of the problems
> with SODA is that it is based on a system designed for creating a
> proportional legislature, but is modified for both creating proportional
> legislatures and for single-winner.  These are 2 different domains and
> should use different systems.  The simplest methods for these domains are:
>
> Single-Winner:
>        Approval-Voting
>
> Proportional Legislature:
>        Asset-Voting
>
>        SODA should just forget about single-winner.  Because it is based on
> a proportional-voting system, it is ilsuited for single winner.
>
>        If voters want to make their votes in an Asset-Election
> nontransferable, that is fine by me, but we should tell them that they run a
> real risk of disenfranchising themselves.
>
> >       ⸘Ŭalabio‽, I understand and sympathize with your desire for
> multiple delegation, but I do not see how a SODA-like system could meet that
> desire without too high a cost in complexity and insecurity. If you think
> that you can resolve these issues, please propose a specific solution and
> explore its implications. As you know, voting system design often involves
> trade-offs, and so "doing P has disadvantage Q" is not a good objection
> against a system unless it's accompanied by "alternative S avoids Q without
> causing any other disadvantages as serious".
>
>         My solution is to scrap SODA SODA as being fundamentally flawed and
> use Approval for single-winner and Asset with 9 votes for proportional with
> an option to makes the votes nontransferable with the understanding that one
> _“*PROBABLY*”_ will disenfranchise oneself if one makes the votes
> nontransferable.
>
>        FairVote started wanting STV for a new house of proportional
> representation or turning the House of Representatives into an house of
> proportional representation using STV.  FairVote settled for using STV for
> single-winner which is IRV.  We all know how lousy IRV turned out.  SODA
> repeats the mistakes of IRV:
>
>        One tries to use Asset for single winner, but it does not work well,
> so one modifies it into SODA which instead of working well for single-winner
> and proportional, works well for neither proportional nor single-winner.
>
>        The fact is that Asset works better than SODA for proportional
> representation and Approval works better than SODA for single-winner.  SODA
> just is not a good tool for the job:
>
>        Let is suppose that we tell steelworkers to build a skyscraper using
> only the tool Allen-Wrench.  The steelworkers are the voters, SODA is the
> Allen-Wrench, and the pile of rubble which is supposed to be a skyscraper is
> the legislature.  SODA is good for neither proportional representation nor
> single-winner.
>
> >       Jameson
>
>        “⸘Ŭalabio‽”
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