[EM] Holy grail: PAR with FBC?

[Michael Ossipoff]

Well, it's a little complicated for offering to the public.

I've asked about methods' acceptability. Alright, I'll be truthful: The
conclusions below are (mostly, but not entirely) only from asking one
person.

Approval: Yes. Some people object to it at first, but the objections are
all answerable. Don't let anyone tell you "It needs study."  It's been
studied. What's needed is for practice to catch up with study. Approval's
simple enough that a few minutes' conversation is sufficient "study".

Score: Acceptable, but not as much as Approval. But when I explain that
people seem to do better in Score than in Approval, because it softens
their voting errors (overompromise & rivalry), then Score is fully
acceptable.

MDDTR: Yes. A simple & brief rule.

IRV: Can be explained briefly (like all the proposable methods).

(Repeatedly, eliminate from the rankings the candidate currently at the top
of fewest rankings.)

Popular with activists, organizations & progressive parties. Not as good as
the methods that I propose, but not bad, if you don't expect much for
voters not in a mutual majority.

Bucklin: Too wordy. But maybe can be acceptably explained as stepwise
Approval. Approval given one candidate at a time, according to rankings. Of
course, as you know, Bucklin, during the Progressive Era, was used in at
least 39 cities.

Approval, Score & Bucklin have use-precedence, and that might make them the
only methods that would be accepted for a 1st reform from Plurality.

IRV too, of course, but I'm sure we all agree that we should try for better
than that. Acceptable, but not among the best, or the ones that I propose.

Well, let's look at that. IRV's problem is that the CWs, if smallest, can
be immediately eliminated before you can help hir (unless you
favorite-bury). But in Bucklin the CWs can lose if hir voters don't plump.
And they might not, if it isn't reliably-known who the CWs is.

But, in Bucklin, you can protect the CWs by top-rating hir, thereby giving
hir an immediate vote (instead of waiting for hir turn way down in your
ranking) before s/he gives away the election by giving it to the other wing.

And, as I was saying: If your favorite is big enough to eliminate the CWs,
then s/he's big enough to be well-known (unless there's a media blackout on
non-Republocrats, like now).  So the CWs's voters will know well about your
candidate. For that reason, if their and your candidates are close and
similar enough that you like the CWs, & consider hir in your top-set or
strong top-set, then most likely the CWs's voters won't transfer to the
opposite wing when s/he gets eliminated.

I've just been stating some mitigations of IRV's problem. And, aside from
that problem, especially if you're majority-favored, IRV has a lot of good
properties, and is strategy-free if you're sure that you're
majority-favored.

But I want things that IRV doesn't offer. Better guarantees for the voter
who _isn't_ majority-protected, because not everyone is (I'm probably not).

By the way, I define majority-protected as:

A voter is majority-protected if a majority prefer at least part of hir
strong top-set to everyone else.

Majority protected is more than and better than just being in a
mutual-majority. It means that you're in a mutual majority that doesn't
reach beyond your strong top-set.

Of course, by that definition, there's no such thing as the
"majority-protected" distinction if you don't have a strong top-set.

Anyway, PAR is complicated for a public proposal. I know that you only
suggest it for a 2nd reform...a reform to replace one better method with
another.

...probably after Approval, Score or Bucklin.

But PAR is still complicated. But, in the future when Approval, Score or
Bucklin has been in use, of course it isn't possible to say for sure that
PAR would still be too complicated.

One more thing: Shouldn't the default rating always be Bottom?

Otherwise everyone will be Accepting a candidate that they don't even know
about.

Michael Ossipoff


On Mon, Nov 7, 2016 at 9:27 AM, Jameson Quinn <jameson.quinn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Here's a new system. It's like PAR, but meets FBC, and deals with center
> squeeze correctly in the few tricky cases where PAR doesn't. I'm
> considering using the PAR name for this system, and renaming the current
> PAR to something like "Old Par
> <http://sr3.wine-searcher.net/images/labels/29/06/grand-old-parr-12-year-old-blended-scotch-whisky-scotland-10152906t.jpg>".
> Meanwhile, the system below is temporarily called PARFBC
> <http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/PARFBC_voting>.
>
>
>    1. Voters can Prefer, Accept, or Reject each candidate. Default is
>    Accept.
>    2. Candidates with a majority of Reject, or with under 25% Prefer, are
>    eliminated, unless that would eliminate all candidates.
>    3. Tally "prefer" ratings for all non-eliminated candidates.
>    4. Find the leader in this tally, and add in "accept" ratings on
>    ballots that don't prefer the leader (if they haven't already been tallied).
>    5. Repeat step 4 until the leader doesn't change. The winner is the
>    final leader.
>
>
> ...
>
> This is pretty much a holy grail system from my perspective. It meets FBC
> (I think; I don't have a proof, but it seems to me it should). It deals
> with a simple chicken dilemma without a slippery slope. It deals with
> center squeeze with naive ballots. I think it even meets the voted majority
> Condorcet criterion, in an election with 3 candidates and where all ballots
> use the full range (and you can add irrelevant "also-rans" to such an
> election without breaking any compliances).
>
> It has a sequential counting process like IRV, and so it fails
> summability; but in most cases, step 4 will not change the outcome, so will
> happen only once. (The main exception is if there's a voted Condorcet
> cycle.)
>
> It even meets weakened versions of both Later No Help and Later No Harm;
> weak enough so that they are compatible with the above passed criteria, but
> strong enough so that I think most voters would be honest. Later No Help
> holds if there's no possible Condorcet cycle; and Later No Harm holds if
> the "later" candidate isn't on the edge of being eliminated.
>
> I think that the explanation is clear and intuitive enough to be
> reasonably acceptable to most voters. It involves only simple adding to
> tallies, not anything couched in terms of sets or multiplication or the
> like.
>
> Does anybody have any reason why this system should not be considered a
> leading contender for "next step after approval"?
>
> ----
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>
>
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