[EM] Anti-defection strategy device for IBIFA

[Michael Ossipoff]

On Fri, Nov 4, 2016 at 9:45 PM, C.Benham <cbenham at adam.com.au> wrote:

If you are only allowed to designate one candidate as your favourite, I
don't see how the method meets FBC.

(endquote)

By the fact that the favorite-designation has no effect or role in the
points sum.

The favorite-designation doesn't give a vote or a point.

If you approve Compromise, and Compromise wins, and then you decide to
approve Favorite too, that will in no way affect the matter of whether or
not Compromise outpolls Worst.

Say Comprise was going to be your favorite, and you were going to approve
hir and designate hir as favorite. S/he would have won. Then Favorite
enters the race. So you'll approve hir too, and designate hir as favorite,
instead of Compromise.

Can that make Compromise lose, if Favorite doesn't win?

All you're changing is the standard for whether a particular conditional
vote should be given.


Well alright, maybe, though you like Favorite better than Compromise
(that's why the arrival of Favorite changed your favorite from Favorite to
Compromise), maybe few other people do. Maybe Favorite is a  favorite to
fewer people. That can result in a conditional vote being given, when it
wouldn't have when Compromise was your designated favorite. The giving of
that other vote could cause Compromise to lose. Maybe Favorite isn't
winnable.

So yes, you're quite right. I started this posting to tell you why you
aren't right, but you are right.

And if, instead, you can designate as many favorites as you want to, and
you add Favorite to your favorite-designation list, instead of replacing
Compromise with Favorite, as favorite, then, the electorate-wide
favoriteness of your most electorate-wide favorite candidate will either
stay the same, or increase. So the addition of Favorite to that list won't
cause a conditional vote to be given that wouldn't have been given before.

If your "favorite-designations" are absolute rather than relative, you'll
leave Compromise with hir favorite-designation. So maybe "favorite" isn't
the best word, because it implies unique best. Maybe "Better".

If your "Better" designations are absolute instead of relative, then the
arrival of Favorite shouldn't make you un-designate Compromise, and so you
won't cause more conditional votes to be given by adding Favorite.

----------------------------------------------

But here's a better possibility: Instead of giving that "Better"
designation to some, why not give a "Less good" designation to the
distrusted voters' candidate, the standard example's "Candidate B"?   .

Then, instead of comparing which of the two candidates has more "Favorite"
or "Better" designations, compare instead which one has fewer "Less Good"
designations throughout the electorate?

Adding Favorite won't have any effect on the number of Less-Good
designations received by your approved candidate with the fewest Less-Good
designations. You could reserve your Less-Good designations for candidates
of distrusted voters, like Candidate B.

Or maybe it would be better to instead give a negative designation to some
candidates. ...a "Worse" designation to some of your unapproved candidates.
But then the comparison of the "Worse" totals would have less relevance the
matter of which of A or B is the more winnable, with the larger faction.

I guess I suspect that these same considerations apply to Conditional
Bucklin too.

My reason for wanting something different from comparing the two
candidates' top-counts was that, by not rating B at top, you're giving hir
poorer protection against someone worse.

I'd hoped that there was a way to avoid that, with a "Favorite" designation
that didn't assign a point or a vote. Evidently that runs into a problem.

So maybe, then, as with 3-Slot ICT, it's necessary to settle for poorer
protection of B, when you demote hir in order to protect against defection
by hir voters.

If so, that means that this Conditional Approval can't be. And it means
that Conditional Bucklin must give poorer protection to Candidate B, when
protecting against defetion by hir voters.

Regrettable. I'd hoped that something better was possible.
.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Well, recently, maybe last month, I proposed my own "Conditional Approval"
and "Conditional Bucklin". it made reciprocity the condition for giving the
conditional vote. I described a perfectly feasible implementation for it.

The problem was that it invites a strategy that results in another
chicken-dilemma--a sort of secondary chicken dilemma.

But surely that's better than the original, primary, chicken dilemma. It
seemed a bit of a mess, but I don't think it failed FBC. But, then, I just
assumed that it didn't. Maybe I didn't look closely enough.

By the way, I'd proposed that same conditional Approval & Bucklin some
years before too, at EM, and rejected it for the same reason.

Maybe it has more promise than the one that I proposed tonight, but maybe
it still has too much problem.

Maybe the kind of conditional comparison you suggested, the top-count, is
the only one that will work well enough.

So maybe we have to settle for poorer help for Candidate B against the
candidates we like less, such as C. Maybe that demotion of B has to, to
some degree, abandon helping hir.

That somewhat disappointed and pessimistic likelihood is my take at this
time.

Michael Ossipoff.



And with no mechanism for sometimes not counting normal below-top approval
the method fails Majority Favourite.

So I judge this to be much worse than 3-slot  "Conditional" IBIFA or MTA or
MCA.

Chris Benham


On 11/5/2016 7:35 AM, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
>
> Let me completely define Conditional Approval. This definition is brief
>> enough to be a proposal for a 1st reform from Plurality:
>>
>> Conditional Approval:
>>
>> You can approve as many or as few candidates as you want to, by marking
>> their names, on the ballot.
>>
>> You also have a place on the ballot where you can indicate your favorite.
>>
>> (in a variation of these rules, you could indicate more than one favorite
>> if you want to.)
>>
>> For any approval that you give, you have the option of marking it as
>> "conditional".
>>
>> A conditional vote is given only if the vote-receiving candidate is
>> designated favorite on more ballots than is your ballot's
>> favorite-designated candidate.
>>
>> (...or (if ballots are allowed to designate more than one favorite) on
>> more ballots than is the candidate favorite-designated on your ballot who
>> is favorite-designated on the most ballots.)
>>
>> The winner is the candidate with the most approvals.
>>
>
> If you are only allowed to designate one candidate as your favourite, I
> don't see how the method meets FBC.
>
> And with no mechanism for sometimes not counting normal below-top approval
> the method fails Majority Favourite.
>
> So I judge this to be much worse than 3-slot  "Conditional" IBIFA or MTA
> or MCA.
>
> Chris Benham
>
>
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