[EM] IRV et al v. EPR

Mon Jul 16 11:10:34 PDT 2018

Looks as if Andrew beat me to the punch. I agree with his specific
suggestions.

2018-07-16 14:09 GMT-04:00 Jameson Quinn <jameson.quinn at gmail.com>:

> This system as described is very close to being an excellent "Proportional
> Majority Judgment" method, but has one key flaw. When a candidate is
> elected with more than 1 quota of support, all of their supporting ballots
> are marked as used. To give a proportional method and to minimize strategic
> incentives, only 1 quota of supporting ballots should be marked as used.
> This could be done through some ordering criterion (highest support for
> winner/lowest support for others), by proportionally reweighting ballots,
> or by using up randomly-chosen ballots; the differences between these three
> options would be relatively minor.
>
> This reflects the basic way to transform any single-winner method into a
> proportional multi-winner method: find single winners sequentially, and
> then for each of those winners, "use up" the one quota of ballots that
> "contributed most" to making that candidate the winner. There's room for
> judgment calls in defining "contributed most", but other than that this is
> a general template that IMO gives an optimal combination of good and
> practical from methods as varied as IRV (which becomes STV), MJ, STAR,
> Score, approval, Condorcet... in short, almost any single-winner method.
>
> Are all good proportional methods examples of this pattern? I wouldn't go
> that far. Delegation and (partial or full) biproportionality are extra
> ingredients that can be added, giving possibilities like (Bavarian-style)
> MMP, DMP, PLACE, and PAD, all worthy alternatives. But "sequential
> allocation methods" using the recipe above should definitely be at least
> one of the mainstays of the proportional toolkit.
>
> Jameson
>
> 2018-07-15 17:55 GMT-04:00 steve bosworth <stevebosworth at hotmail.com>:
>
>>  The recent responses to Sennet’s attempt favorably to report some
>> recent successes of RCV (i.e. IRV) prompt me to hope that readers will be
>> willing to test the counter claims of a newly developed voting and counting
>> method for electing multi-winners.  This method is fully described in
>> the following published article:
>>
>> http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-
>> proportional-representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/
>>
>>
>> <http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/>
>> Legislatures Elected by Evaluative Proportional ...
>> <http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/>
>> www.jpolrisk.com
>> This article explains how a new voting method called Evaluative
>> Proportional Representation (EPR) fully satisfies the demand that in the
>> best representative democracy, no citizen’s vote would be involuntarily
>> wasted, quantitatively or qualitatively. 2 EPR is intended for voters who
>> are electing members of a legislative body, for example a ...
>>
>>
>> This method is called Evaluative Proportional Representation (EPR).  EPR
>> builds upon the arguments for Majority Judgment (MJ)offered by Balinski and
>> Laraki (2010, MIT). For example, when electing all the members of a city
>> council, each EPR citizen is asked to evaluate (not rank) as many of the
>> candidates in the city as she might wish, i.e. to grade each with regard to
>> their fitness for the office: either EXCELLENT, VERY GOOD, GOOD,
>> ACCEPTABLE, POOR, or REJECT.  The article explains the relatively simple
>> step by step method by which all these evaluations are counted by hand (or
>> by the algorithm provided).  As a result, each citizen’s one vote
>> continues fully to count in the deliberations and decisions of the council.
>> It does this through the weighted vote earned by one of the elected
>> members, i.e. the one winner whom she has helped to elect and judges to be
>> the one most qualified for the office.
>>
>> Unlike any known variety of plurality, ranking (Condorcet or IRV (RCV,
>> STV, etc.), range, or approving voting methods, only EPR allows each
>> citizen to guarantee that her one vote will continue to count in the
>> council (or legislature).  Also, I'd like to offer Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
>> some hope:  perhaps the extra appeal of this unique feature of EPR would
>> prompt enough citizens in a state like California to adopt EPR by one of
>> its referenda.
>>
>> Again, only EPR allows no vote to be wasted as defined by the second
>> paragraph of the article.
>>
>> What do you think?
>>
>> I look forward to your feedback.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------
>>
>>
>>
>> Today's Topics:
>>
>>    1. Re: IRV / RCv advances (Abd ul-Rahman Lomax)
>>
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Message: 1
>> Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2018 14:08:24 -0400
>> From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd at lomaxdesign.com>
>> To: election-methods at lists.electorama.com
>> Subject: Re: [EM] IRV / RCv advances
>> Message-ID: <69bc286e-c970-9f6c-e60a-21e7f900f81c at lomaxdesign.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
>>
>>
>> On 7/14/2018 10:08 AM, Richard Lung wrote:
>>
>> > [...] Agree completely about score voting. I can't help but feel
>> > approval voting is essentially a rebranding of cumulative voting. In
>> > about 1867, John Stuart Mill knew it was only a trifling improvement
>> > on plurality counting but at least opened peoples minds to alternatives.
>> I'd question that simply counting all the votes would be a "trifling
>> improvement." It would have flipped the US presidential election in
>> 2000, almost certainly, and is a no-cost improvement, simple to
>> implement and easy to understand. In a two-round system, it can provide
>> substantial flexibility, perhaps even allowing runoffs to have a third
>> candidate. Counting all the votes would be, again, an improvement over
>> IRV, allowing voters to equal-rank. But the IRV method, by discarding
>> votes, is intrinsically flawed, and Bucklin actually worked when used.
>> The arguments that it didn't work were based on the fact that it wasn't
>> magic pixie dust. The only system that fixes about everything is Asset,
>> which hardly gets any consideration at all. My suggestion has been for
>> EM reformers to suggest Asset for NGOS, since it's really simple, as
>> well, and creates a deliberative structure, which is far more flexible
>> -- and functionally democratic -- than pure amalgamation. To be
>> fail-safe, it could be used in a nomination process, to be actually
>> ratified for a final result.
>>
>> Approval -- and most methods -- are plurality methods unless a true
>> majority of the votes is required for a result. In Australia, in some
>> places they accomplish that by making it illegal to not completely rank.
>> In other words, to make a result more "democratic," coerce the voters.
>> Ah, the things people do to preserve the way things are!
>> > Re 3.
>> > Weighted Condorcet pairing arguably offers a back-door that partly
>> > gets round the Laplace criticism of Condorcet pairing, that it does
>> > not establish the relative importance of higher and lower preferences,
>> > in the over-all election count.
>> > I see Condorcet pairing primarily as a research tool for
>> > cross-referencing the results of an at-large election with the results
>> > from sub-elections of one-to-one contests or less minimal partitions.
>> > Ideally, we would have an election system that does not have to watch
>> > its back for a Condorcet paradox.
>> A condorcet paradox is an indication of an incomplete process. Depending
>> on preference strength, which some Condorcet methods attempt to
>> estimate, it might be meaningless. But to truly analyse election returns
>> requires preference strength information. Borda, again, estimates it
>> with an assumption of full ranking, such that with many candidates, the
>> "rank distance" would approximate a measure of preference strength.
>>
>> But the only ballot that actually allows the voters to directly express
>> preference strength is a score ballot. And then some advocates of other
>> systems point out Condoret failure, as if that matters when preference
>> strength is obviously low. It doesn't. And then it is pointed out that
>> voters may vote "strategically," as if that is dishonest or bad. In a
>> Score system, there is never any incentive to reverse preference. Voters
>> decide what preferences matter to them, and will vote accordingly, and a
>> good overall system will detect situations where is ambiguity, perhaps
>> due to inaccurate perception of probable results, and will then set up a
>> runoff.
>>
>> Instead of working together to create a system that will actually
>> improve and foster full democracy, we don't, it seems, trust the people
>> and want them to conform to our own ideas. In other words, same old same
>> old. The problem with democracy is the damn people!
>>
>> But democracy is still government by consent, and whenever that fails,
>> oppression is inevitable. It's only a question of how bad it gets. The
>> logic that captured me, so many decades ago, is that we need
>> representation by consent and choice, not by "winners" and "losers." And
>> that appears to be doable. But who cares enough to try it?
>>
>> Some. Not yet enough, but it's possible any day. It might only take one
>> person to make a proposal and carry it through, in one place.
>>
>> >
>> > Even an admittedly crude election like IRV (Alternative Vote),
>> > according to this group, has only come-up with the Burlington case.
>> > That may have been politically unfortunate. But, if about 150?
>> > elections have not suffered the paradox, that incidence is not
>> > statistically significant.
>>
>> It is possible to show that about one-third of IRV results were not
>> optimal. This is done by comparing IRV results with top-two runoff
>> results. If a full-information ballot were used with IRV (it could be
>> done! Easily!) we would then know. However, actually collecting the data
>> to determine, definitively, if a voting system is actually working is
>> not a part of any reform proposal I have seen. The collecting of
>> information is confused with and considered less important than creating
>> a result, and I can easily see the counter-argument: what if this causes
>> the result of an election to be called into question? Won't this damage
>> our trust in government? I think I have actually seen that argument.
>>
>> If our trust in government is based in ignorance, it's worse than a bit
>> of trouble. A simple, coarse-score ballot, with explicit approval
>> cutoff, would be cheap and easy, and how the actual result is determined
>> could be explicity declared on the ballot. Providing the additonal
>> information would be optional. One could vote the ballot, if one
>> chooses, as vote-for-one. It would all generate useful information, and
>> could guide future election method decisions.
>> > The real comparison is how many "Bush beats Gore minus Nader" contests
>> > are there?
>>
>> In a two-party system. Duverger's law and party attempts to corner the
>> electorate create many of them. Look at any close election and at the
>> participation of minor parties in it. There may be hundreds of these a
>> year. As well, the existing system tends to suppress minor party
>> participation. New York has Fusion voting, a step in a direction of
>> improved democracy. It was proposed for Massachusetts and lost. Who
>> opposed it?
>>
>> The "Democratic" party, of course! It lost. So why did people vote
>> against it? Well, perhaps they trusted their party. After all, isn't our
>> party the Good Guys? If it's bad for them, surely we don't want it! It
>> all makes sense until and unless one starts to look more closely, which
>> most people don't do. And realizing that, Dodgson proposed Asset, which
>> actually creates, very simply, representative government, with the good
>> stuff associated with that, while allowing low-level decisions, by
>> ordinary people who don't want their lives to be about politics, to be
>> useful and effective.
>>
>> >
>> > And how many simple plurality elections make voters act as their own
>> > returning officers in an implicit ranked choice election, where the
>> > voter excludes his first preference for Nader, and counts it for
>> > second preference Gore?
>> My sense is that many would vote for a third party candidate if they did
>> not know it would be a wasted vote. It could be trivial to fix that
>> problem. But we obviously care about something else more. about what?
>>
>>
>>
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