[EM] (5) APR: Steve's 5th dialogue with Kristofer & Others

Thu Oct 1 14:08:41 PDT 2015

Re:
(5) APR: Steve's 5th dialogue with Kristofer

> Date: Sat, 08 Aug 2015 11:44:57
+0200

> From: Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at t-online.de>

> To: steve bosworth <stevebosworth at hotmail.com>,

> "election-methods at lists.electorama.com"

> Subject: Re: [EM] (4) APR: Steve's 4th dialogue with Kristofer

> Message-ID: <55C5CF99.1080206 at t-online.de>

> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed

> 

 On 07/17/2015 09:54 PM, steve bosworth
wrote:

Hi Kristofer and all other readers,

Sorry,
I too have been delayed in replying sooner.

>K:
By the way, my mail client says your posts are in the Windows-1254 

> format. Are you writing on a Turkish computer? If not, something might 

> be strange with your setup.

S:
 Now, I’m using Windows 10 and Office
2013.

> > Re: (4) APR: Steve's 4th dialogue with Kristofer

> >

> > Date: Wed, 01 Jul 2015 22:14:11 +0200

> > > From: Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at t-online.de>

> > > To: Election Methods Mailing List
<election-methods at electorama.com>

> > > Subject: [EM] Thresholded weighted multiwinner elections

> > > Message-ID: <55944A13.7060800 at t-online.de>

> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed

> >

S: Steve's questions will follow each element of what Kristofer wrote:

> >

>  K: I think I see why the cloning
attack is possible in two-stage weighted

> > > voting. If I'm right, then it is possible to make voting methods
that

> > > produce results that fit weighted voting better -- at least when
the

> > > voters are honest. However, I'm not sure if it is possible at
all if

> > > enough voters are strategic.

> >

>S: Am I mistaken in believing that, in practice, APR's 'weighted

> > multiwinner elections' would not be vulnerable to the threats either
of

> > effective 'cloning' or of other kinds of 'strategic voting'?

> 

>K: As a side note: the Duggan-Schwartz theorem implies that every 

> deterministic ranked voting method is sometimes vulnerable to strategic 

> voting, even if it's a multiwinner method rather than a single-winner 

> one. So every method is in some sense flawed; we just have to find good 

> ones. Since APR's method is a ranked multiwinner method and thus covered 

> by D-S, it can't be invulnerable to strategic voting. The question is 

> whether it's good enough.

> 

> As for the cloning attack, I specifically found it while analyzing APR's 

> voting method. So it's meant to work against APR's voting method 

> (semimajoritarian IRV). It is not quite as strong as I originally 

> thought, but would still lead to party list in an equilibrium. See below.

S: 
Please explain what you mean by ‘party-list equilibrium’ and how it
relates to APR.

> 

> > S: This practical invulnerability would seem to arise from the facts

> > that APR's election

> > of reps to a large national assembly would allow all citizens to rank

> > as few or as many of all the thousands of candidates in the country.

> > Accordingly, for example, the portion of all the perceived clones

> > would be elected only if and when each is discover to be, for
example, one among the 435

> > most popular candidates in the USA. Each APR elected candidate receives
a weighted vote in the assembly equal to the number of votes that each had
received directly or indirectly from citizens.

S: 
Yes, I must accept the THEORETICAL possibility that strategic voting could
be used with APR.  However, am I correct
in understanding that all strategic voting requires the strategizer to have accurate
knowledge about how all other relevant people will be voting.  I do not see how any person or party could
acquire such knowledge in the above APR election of a ‘large national assembly’
which allows each ‘citizens to rank as few or as many of all the thousands of
candidates in the country’.  This is why
it seems to me that successful strategic voting would be impossible for
PRACTICAL purposes.  Your Taiwan example
does explain how parties might try to organize strategic voting but why should
we worry about it succeeding in the case of APR. 

> 

> K: As I may have mentioned, we can abstract
the two-stage voting method [….]

S: Yes, you did mention this but I do
not yet understand why you are discussing it.  APR’s counting of all the ranking in the
general election is a one-stage method with 4 counts:  These are explained in the following Endnotes
(4 and 9) to my article:

4. APR's use of Asset Voting
(also see Endnotes 2 & 12) provides two ways in which a representative may
also receive some votes from citizens indirectly:  Firstly, when none of the candidates ranked
by a citizen have received enough votes to be elected, she can require her
first choice but eliminated candidate to pass her 'default' vote on to the candidate
he most trusts, e.g. the candidate highest on his pre-declared list.  He must sequentially do this until one of his
favored candidates is elected.  All these
available 'default' votes must be sequentially transferred, one by one,
beginning with those held by the eliminated candidate who currently has the
fewest number of votes.  If more than one
eliminated candidate share this position of currently being the least popular,
the order in which they will transfer the 'default' votes each holds will be determined
by lot.

If and when any of these
default votes fail to help elect any representative after all the holders of
these default votes has made these provisional transfers, each must then be
given to the representative who has now been elected and is most favored by the
eliminated candidate who holds it.  

Secondly, in response to the
possibility that a very popular representative may initially receive more than
10% of the country’s weighted vote, she must publish exactly how these 'extra'
votes will be non-returnably added to the weighted vote of her trusted fellow
representative(s).  This is to avoid any
question of a representative being in a position to ‘dictate’ to the
assembly.  The transferring of these
extra votes would proceed sequentially, starting with the representative who
had received the most votes above the 10% limit.

Consequently, the list of all
the elected candidates and their different weighted votes is finalized only
after two earlier ‘provisional’ counts have been completed.  The first produces a provisional list of the
pre-established number of elected candidates by counting all citizens' votes,
except those which had been given only to eliminated candidates.  The second provisional count would produce a
somewhat modified list by also counting the 'default' votes as described above.

The third count would include
all the transferred 'extra' votes from the above very popular representatives
who had received more than 10% of all the votes. Consequently, this third and
final list would contain all the pre-established number of representatives,
each with his or her finalized weighted vote in the assembly, none with more
than 10% of all the citizens’ votes. 
Each citizen would know to which representative's weighted vote her vote
had been added.  Also see Endnote 9.

9. The FEC
both ensures that each association’s APR general election ballot paper will be
given to each of its registered voters at his or her local voting station on
election day, and coordinates the countrywide
counting of all citizens' rankings. This count determines both which candidates
are elected and exactly how many weighted votes each representative will have
in the House of Representatives.  Each
will have a weighted vote exactly equal to the number of citizens whose votes
helped to elect them.

All 435 elected candidates (congresspersons) would be discovered by
counting the rankings from all voting citizens in the country.  They would be found by sequentially eliminating the least popular candidate from the race,
one by one, until only the pre-established number of reps for each association
remain.  Again, each of these
representatives would have a weighted vote in the House of Representatives
exactly equal to the number of rankings (votes) each had received by the time
the last candidate had been eliminated, and all the 'default' and 'extra' votes
had been transferred (see Endnote 4).

S: 
Does this make it any clearer that strategic voting would be practically
impossible using APR?

S: 
What do you think?

S: 
If you still think that the remaining parts of your reply to our 4th
APR dialogue are relevant, let me know and I will respond to them as best I
can.

Thank you,

Steve

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