[EM] Implics of realism 4 electoral analytics and advocacy.
David L Wetzell
wetzelld at gmail.com
Wed May 8 12:34:46 PDT 2013
If there are economies of scale in running as a competitive candidate for
an important or larger-scale, single-winner election, regardless of which
election rule gets used, then we can expect the number of competitive
candidates, i.e. candidates with an a prior chance of winning with a
score-voting rule of greater than .01, to be relatively low. This would
consequently lower the relative value of most alternatives to
first-past-the-post, presuming the existence of multiple non-serious
candidates, and make the short-term likelihood of successful adoption the
key criterion for which alternative to first-past-the-post should be
advocated by electoral analysts/reformers of good will. When I say
good-will, I mean as opposed to those who might be supported by those who
unduly benefit from the status-quo to muddy the waters and thereby divide
electoral analysts/advocates.
If one did a Bayesian Regret analysis with seven candidates but drew the
candidates from two different distribution, one with a good chance of
winning and the other with a very small chance of winning in a fair contest
then that might be a more realistic way to assess the relative value of
different election rules. One might model the number of competitive
candidates as being one plus the output of a Poisson random variable with a
mean of one or one.five. It would likely be a lot more meaningful than if
the a prior odds of winning of all seven candidates are the same, because
in that case the odds of competitive three-way at the top election would be
rather high.
I think it's clear analytically that in a three-way competitive election,
IRV is not as reliable in choosing the condorcet candidate or lowering
Bayesian Regret. But I think there are good reasons to presume that in
real life, in larger-scale single-winner elections that three-way
competitive races will be relatively rare by the end of the election
season, which is what counts for the evaluation of election rules: the
preferences of voters on election day.
dlw
On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 2:02 PM, <
election-methods-request at lists.electorama.com> wrote:
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> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Approval Voting (David L Wetzell)
> 2. WHICH VOTING SYSTEM(S) DO REAL VOTERS WANT - FINALLY, CLEAR
> EVIDENCE EMERGES! (Warren D Smith)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 14:21:48 -0500
> From: David L Wetzell <wetzelld at gmail.com>
> To: EM <election-methods at lists.electorama.com>
> Subject: [EM] Approval Voting
> Message-ID:
> <CAMyHmndPGozxU3JLdo=
> N-5qjzv9e+jpQQmUEdzt3-bUi-Wd7Vw at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> In the scenario below.
>
> From: Jonathan Denn <info at aGREATER.US>
>
> In a three way race for POTUS. Let's say we have the traditional D and R. A
> fringe third party candidate runs and is widely hated (H) by everyone
> except his/her supporters. But the final results are
>
> H 34%
> D 33%
> R 33%
>
> Now the hated candidate is leader of the free world.
>
> In Approval Voting, I think it unlikely in this hyper-partisan country that
> many voters will vote for D & R, and not H. So the results might very well
> be the same.
>
> Is this a legit flaw for Approval? It seems quite plausible to me.
>
> dlw: But if Ds prefer Rs way over Hs and Rs prefer Ds way over Hs then
> both parties could easily adopt a strategy of flipping a coin at the voting
> booth and voting their approval for the other party's candidate over the Hs
> candidate if they get heads. This would then make the %s,
> H: 34%
> D: 49.5+e%
> R: 49.5+f%
>
> And so there'd be a 50-50 chance that either major-non-extremist party
> would get elected depending on whether e><f.
>
> Now, I believe that the economies of scale in running a big campaign tends
> to make a 3-way competitive election relatively unlikely, which in turn
> tends to make most alternatives to FPTP of close to the same value-added.
> This is why I believe the focus shd be on changing the mix of
> single-winner and multi-winner/(quasi-)PR elections in such a way that will
> tend to increase the % of competitive seats. That'll make it so there'd be
> less acrimony, since neither of the (likely two) major parties would be
> able to dominate the other and so it'd be rat'l for them to cooperate to
> maintain their duopolistic positions.
> dlw
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> Message: 2
> Date: Tue, 7 May 2013 23:41:30 -0400
> From: Warren D Smith <warren.wds at gmail.com>
> To: election-methods <election-methods at electorama.com>
> Subject: [EM] WHICH VOTING SYSTEM(S) DO REAL VOTERS WANT - FINALLY,
> CLEAR EVIDENCE EMERGES!
> Message-ID:
> <
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>
> Academics just conducted another study in 3 French towns (exit poll)
> of several score voting schemes & approval voting in 2012 presidential
> election. All produced the same winner as the official winner,
> Hollande.
>
> I'm using the following paper by them (in French):
> http://RangeVoting.org/France1220.pdf
>
> Anyhow, they appended a QUESTIONNAIRE to the approximately 2340 voters who
> participated in this voting study, getting 80-95% response rates to
> these additional questions.
>
> QUESTION 1 asked which type of voting they prefer. Apparently this
> question was conducted using 4-choice plurality voting (sigh). 1958
> answered.
> The 4 choices were:
> I. Les deux regles ("the two rules??" does this mean the present
> 2-round system?
> Or does it mean "I want both approval and score voting"?) 27.53%
>
> II.Vote par approbation ("approval voting") 29.47%
>
> III.Vote par note ("score voting") 32.84% WINNER!!
>
> IV.Aucune des deux ("neither of them") 10.11%
>
> Can any French-speaker explain what the hell that was all about?
> This question wording seems extremely poor.
> Elsewhere in same paper the official system was described as
> "Vote uninominal a deux tours (officiel)."
> Fortunately, we can dodge all that since question 2 works excellently.
>
> QUESTION 2a asked for which kinds of elections approval voting system
> should be used (or not). 4 subquestions:
>
> Elections presidentielles: 61%.
> Elections legislatives: 57%.
> Elections municipales: 61%.
> Associations: 52%.
>
> QUESTION 2b asked for which kinds of elections score voting system
> should be used (or not). same 4 subquestions:
>
> Elections presidentielles: 62%.
> Elections legislatives: 55%.
> Elections municipales: 66%.
> Associations: 51%.
>
> Superb. Majority wants them for everything, and 61% is
> equivalent to the largest ever USA presidential "landslides."
> This to me is the first really convincing evidence the populace WANT
> approval and range voting.
>
> Meanwhile there also is convincing poll evidence from UK, Australia,
> and BC Canada
> that voters do NOT want IRV (instant runoff, full rank ordering) if
> choice is between IRV & plain plurality voting.
> AUSTRALIA October 2010 nationwide professional telephone poll (NewsPoll
> http://www.rangevoting.org/AustraliaNewsPollVoteStudy.pdf ) 1202
> random Australian adults: found that they prefer plain-plurality
> voting versus the preferential (instant runoff) system they presently
> use to elect their House. If forced to choose one, they'd choose to
> abandon IRV ? the poll's result was 57% to 37% (with 5% don't
> know/refuse).
> UK: 5 May 2011 binding referendum asking voters to decide whether the
> UK should switch from plurality to IRV voting, resulting in a massive
> landslide victory (68% to 32% of the 19.3 million votes) for "stay
> with plurality."
> British Columbia Canada 12 May 2009: "switch to IRV" (from plain
> plurality) got only 39.09% of the 1.65 million votes in referendum.
>
> And I just posted landslide poll evidence voters do NOT want "majority
> judgment" with 7-point verbal scale, if choosing between it and
> present 2-round plurality plus 2nd round runoff system:
> FRANCE April 2011:
> http:/rangevoting.org/Sondageopinionway.pdf
> At the end of this poll of 1000, the pollees were asked WHICH voting method
> they preferred:
> 1. Traditional (plurality plus 2nd round runoff): 63%
> 2. MJ (median-based with verbal 7-point scale): 36%
> 3. Other/don't know: 1%
>
> Now returning to the academic study in the 3 towns, they trialed
> DIFFERENT score voting systems in the 3 towns:
>
> TOWN...........TYPE OF SCORE VOTING TRIALED
> Louvigny...............{-1, 0, +1}
> St.Etienne.............{0, 1, 2}
> Strasbourg............{0, 1, 2, ..., 19, 20}
>
> And the result of question 2b was that there was CLEARLY MORE SUPPORT for
> {-1,0,+1} and {0,1,2} than for {0,1,2,...,19,20} but in contrast
> question 2a got about the same support rates in all 3 towns.
>
> CONCLUSION:
> Voters want:
>
> Avg-based score voting (unspecified numerical scale) > Approval voting
> > 2-round plurality > MJ with 7-point verbal scale
>
> and
>
> plain plurality voting > IRV
>
> and
>
> Avg-based score voting with 3-point numerical scale (don't care if
> {-1,0,+1} or {0,1,2}) > Avg-based score voting with 21-point numerical
> scale.
>
>
>
> --
> Warren D. Smith
> http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking
> "endorse" as 1st step)
>
>
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> End of Election-Methods Digest, Vol 107, Issue 6
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