[EM] Voting-System Choice for Polls (Just one more thing I want to say)

[Toby Pereira]

It depends on what you mean by polls. If it's just an opinion poll to see what the likely result will be in an election (so something that isn't in any way binding itself), it's about more than finding a method that will produce a winner. You want to be able to see the support of all the candidates, and by having a method that's just set up for a winner (your suggestion of the pairwise winner from two different counting methods), you're not going to achieve what you want to achieve. For this sort of poll, you can use a variety of different methods and publish all the results.
But if you're just talking about elections that aren't for public office, then things are different. Some of these elections can be done online. And for those that are likely to have an involved electorate that are likely to be knowledgeable about the system, I would suggest score voting but with live totals published and changeable votes. So people can enter their scores, but if the current result suggested they will need to adopt a more strategic approach, they can change their vote accordingly. The only other thing I would add is that the end time should probably be in some way non-deterministic. Otherwise the live updates are likely to be less effective. People might withhold their vote until the last minute, or have a completely false vote that they change at the last minute. So you might have 24 hours guaranteed (or however long is deemed appropriate), and then it might randomly end with a half life of an hour or something (which could be longer if the initial guaranteed time is longer).
Toby


 
      From: Michael Ossipoff <email9648742 at gmail.com>
 To: EM <election-methods at lists.electorama.com> 
 Sent: Sunday, 18 December 2016, 6:05
 Subject: [EM] Voting-System Choice for Polls (Just one more thing I want to say)
   
Before quitting EM & retiring from voting-systems, there's one more thing I'd like to say:

What's the best voting-system for polls?

Though FBC is important for official political elections, I don't think it serves a purpose in polls, where the purpose is to get sincere rankings, and hope that people vote sincere rankings. In polls, the compulsion to favorite-bury is much less likely.

As I've said, I haven't noticed any sign (top-cycles for 1st place) of strategy in polls.

I suggest that, for sincere electorates, MAM is the ideal best. That means it's best for polls at the Condorcet Internet Voting Service, where there's been no sign of strategy.

But what if you're doing a poll among people who are highly involved in the subject that you're polling about, and have strong committment to some alternatives? Like, for example, suppose you're pollng at EM about voting-systems?

Maybe some members of the electorate will resort to strategy. Especially if the electorate are a voting-system mailing-lislt.

So you can't really be sure that there'll be no chicken-dilemma defection.

So maybe, instead of MAM, Smith//MMPO should be used.

It is automatically resistant to chicken-dilemma defection.

But, for burial, it isn't as good as MAM. With MAM, a candidate that you, & sufficiently-many others, don't rank can't beat the CWs by burial.

...but it can in MMPO, though there's a lot of uncertainty & risk in trying burial in MMPO.

Maybe Smith//MMPO's reliable automatic chicken-dilemma protection is more important, because defection is easier & less drastic a strategy than burial.

But maybe MAM's better burial protection is more important, because burial temptation & opportunity is a lot more common than a chicken-dilemma situation.

My suggestion: Use both.

Do the count by Smith//MMPO, & by MAM. Of the winners by those 2 methods, the final winner is the one that pairwise-beats the other.

That's a solid good solution, because:

In the chicken-dilemma example, and also in a burial example, the intended victim of the offensive strategy pairbeats the perps' candidate.

So, declaring, as winner, the one of those 2 winners that pairbeats the other is definitely the best solution, if MAM & Smith//MMPO are the best choices, each of which offers better protection in different ways.

Of course, it's been pointed out that methods that elect the pair-winner, among the winners by 2 different methods, tend to fail FBC.

But FBC isn't needed in polls, where you want sincere ranking, not equal-top-ranking.

Michael Ossipoff

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