[EM] Approval-based replacement for jungle primary

[Ted Stern]

Thinking some more about Rob's MAF proposal, I think I have it boiled down
to a simple method:

First round:

Total Approval Winner (AW) plus any other candidate with >= 50% approval,
plus the Complementary Approval Winner (CAW) -- the candidate who is
approved most on ballots that do not approve AW.

Second round Approval Winner is the overall winner.

Rationale:

If AW and other candidates have >= 50% approval, the sincere Condorcet
winner is probably among them.

If AW has < 50% support, the sincere Condorcet Winner might not be included
as the Approval runner up if the AW is part of a clone set.

In addition, having a contrasting candidate to the AW, no matter what the
level of approval, means that the sentiment space in which an approval
cutoff is measured is broadened.

This method is clone-resistant, summable, and resistant to pushover.  I
think that it may also be resistant to burying.

I would like to see a Yee plot of this method.  I may eventually get around
to programming that but it could be a while.

On Mon, Mar 18, 2019 at 2:41 PM Ted Stern <dodecatheon at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello Rob (et al.),
>
> Returning to this after a while out of the loop.
>
> Two round methods have been on my mind while walking the dogs.
>
> After a lot of thought, I think that if you're going to just use Approval,
> the simplest method would be to have a runoff between the Approval Winner
> and the complementary Approval Winner ( "CAW", wins approval on all ballots
> that do not approve of AW), and leave it at that.  And that would occur
> only if the AW had less than 50 percent of the vote.
>
> But that still seems unsatisfactory to me.  I'm not happy with allowing
> the possibility of letting clones into the second round, but it also feels
> like there might be a compromise candidate who is missed.  Maybe take the
> AW and AW-runner-up and the CAW plus CAW-runner-up.  I'd be willing to go
> with this based on its simplicity.
>
> I've been looking again at Jameson Quinn's 3-2-1 voting method (
> https://electowiki.org/wiki/3-2-1_voting).  It has a number of attractive
> properties, but a plurality faction could defeat it with clones.
>
> It seems to me that one could make 3-2-1 cloneproof and get a 2-round
> method at the same time:
>
>
>    - W321 = 3-2-1 voting winner according to Jameson's page above.
>    - On all ballots that do not approve of W321, find the 3 candidates
>    with highest top ("Good") rating sums (summed over only those ballots not
>    approving W321).
>    - Of those 3 candidates, drop the candidate with lowest top +
>    compromise ("Good" + "OK") ratings (summed over only those ballots not
>    approving W321).
>    - Between those two remaining candidates, CW321 = the candidate most
>    preferred on non-W321 ballots.
>
> In a single round election the winner would be the candidate most
> preferred between W321 and CW321 on all ballots.  Up until the CW321 step
> above, all aspects of the method are summable in a single pass, but finding
> the CW requires another pass, thought that would be summable.  Then the
> W321 vs. CW321 pairwise check would require another pass.
>
> For a two round election, you could have the W321 winner and the runner
> up, plus the two candidates from the CW321 step.  And the 2nd round would
> only be necessary if the W321 candidate had less than 50% approval, or
> either of the CW321 pair were preferred to W321.  This would be at most 4
> candidates, and would require only a single summable pass through the
> ballots.
>
> For the final round, you would still have to do the clone-proofing step,
> but it would be much easier with at most 4 choices.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 5, 2018 at 1:41 PM Rob Lanphier <robla at robla.net> wrote:
>
>> Hi Ted,
>>
>> This has been an incredibly helpful discussion!  More inline...
>>
>> On Mon, Dec 3, 2018 at 11:11 PM Ted Stern <dodecatheon at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > What you're describing with your percent satisfaction sounds a lot
>> > like Proportional Representation, though the context of a primary is
>> > quite different.
>> >
>> > I come from the school of "challenge makes you stronger", so I would
>> > welcome more contrasting voices into the general election.
>>
>> Yeah, I think we may have been educated in the same school. ;-)  I
>> would welcome contrasting voices too, to a point.  An approval-based
>> primary should only advance candidates who are trying to ultimately
>> get a high approval rating in the general election.  The primary
>> election should select candidates with the desire and ability to earn
>> the approval of a majority of voters during the general election
>> cycle, rather than wasting the time and energy of the general election
>> electorate who may not have the time or patience to evaluate
>> candidates who aren't serious contenders.
>>
>> Ted also wrote:
>> > I think that including the complementary opposition winners against your
>> > "truly viable candidates" would be a way to do that.
>> >
>> > You're more likely to get engagement and consequent turnout when more
>> > people feel like their voices are being heard in the debate. A slate of
>> > blandly similar center seekers would be a recipe for voter apathy.
>>
>> My hope is that after a few years, primary election voters become
>> accustomed to the system.  They might then stop approving bland
>> center-seekers, and start approving exciting center-seekers.  Or maybe
>> bland but incredibly competent center seekers.  Voters would hopefully
>> be at liberty to stop being overly-focused on the left-right
>> continuum, and start looking at other dimensions (e.g.
>> competence-incompetence, honesty-corruption,
>> charisma-unpersuasiveness). If elections became a little less
>> exciting, that might actually be a good thing.
>>
>> Moreover, voters would hopefully become more generous about approving
>> candidates in the primary that they're not yet ready to vote for in
>> the general election, as a way of saying "hey, having Katie
>> McKrazypants in the general election debates ought to make things
>> interesting!  Let's vote for her!".   Over time, I suspect that
>> candidates would get good at positioning themselves as good
>> safe-to-fail experimental candidates.  Then the general election
>> becomes the safeguard where many of the same voters might then cast a
>> more critical vote.  Given that we'll have over seven months(!) to vet
>> the general election candidates, we should assume that some voters
>> will change their mind, and/or Katie McCrazypants would get thoroughly
>> vetted and found to be not-so-crazy after all.
>>
>> A close candidate who gets 45% approval (e.g Cassie McCloseypants) but
>> doesn't get quite enough approval to advance to the general election
>> still sends a pretty strong signal.  It would seem that at least some
>> of the advancing general election candidates (e.g. Larissa
>> McLeftypants and Ronald McRightypants) would come to understand that
>> the 45% candidate (Cassie McCloseypants) was trying to advance some
>> issues that are worthy of further discussion during the general
>> election cycle.  Both general election candidates would be well
>> advised to seek out an endorsement from Cassie McCloseypants, and
>> would have plenty of time to broker for support from the Cassie
>> McCloseypants campaign (e.g. recruiting volunteers, getting email
>> lists, getting contact databases, etc)
>>
>> Ted also wrote:
>> > If the viable candidates are A_1 (= Approval Winner), A_2 (Approval
>> > runner up), etc., with complementary opponents B_1, B_2, etc., then I
>> > think it would be appropriate to add them in (A_i, B_i) pairs until your
>> > desired representation level is met.
>> >
>> > Actually, I don't know if I would put the truly viable cutoff at 50%. In
>> > a true jungle primary, you might end up with only 40% winners at the
>> > highest.  I might go down to 33. 3% A_i candidates if that's what it
>> > takes to get at least 66.6% voter representation.
>>
>> The tradeoff that we're up against: providing genuine choice for a
>> large part of the electorate vs properly culling the list of primary
>> contenders so as not to overwhelm voters with options.  Though I
>> suspect your intuition is correct about almost all candidates scoring
>> well under 50% in the first few elections, my fear is that you're
>> being too generous for the long-term.  The benefit of having a 50%
>> threshold for _automatic_ advancement to the general election is that
>> it makes the barrier high enough that it becomes difficult for rabid
>> extremists to game the system.
>>
>> What I fear: as the system becomes routine, sophisticated candidates
>> will learn to optimize their primary candidacies to achieve whatever
>> the minimum percentage required to guarantee them a spot on the
>> general election ballot.  50% is a respectable target.  33% is
>> horrifyingly low target.  With FPTP, we live in a world where each
>> party optimizes for 50.1% inclusion by estranging the other 49.9% that
>> aren't part of the tribe.  I shudder to think about what tactics would
>> emerge to optimize political tribes for 33.4% in/66.6% out.
>>
>> Mind you, I'm still proposing we develop a small loophole for allowing
>> "marginally viable candidates" to advance, though only in service of
>> increasing overall ballot satisfaction.  It seems too large of a
>> loophole to allow *every* complementary candidate to the runners-up to
>> advance, doesn't it?  Granted, it does at least provide disincentive
>> for the dominant political party to flood the field with clones, but
>> it also seems like it would be possible for the complementary
>> candidates to be fringe, extremist candidates with very low approval
>> scores.  Perhaps the answer to that is to just set the floor for
>> "marginally viable" to be 40%, and then only advance marginally viable
>> candidates who increase the ballot satisfaction score.  We can also
>> still limit the number of marginally viable candidates who advance
>> (the "opposition candidate pool") by maintaining the rule that the
>> opposition candidate pool will be no larger than the majority
>> candidate pool.
>>
>> I suspect that it would take a few years of usage before any
>> second-place candidate gets above 50% approval.  In fact, it may be
>> common for even the Approval Winner (AW) to get less than 50%.
>>
>> With all this in mind, it may be worth reading Clay Shentrup's
>> responses to my blog post:
>> <https://medium.com/@ClayShentrup/i-challenge-this-858b5ab0a09a>
>> <https://medium.com/@ClayShentrup/way-too-much-complexity-b4b2c8d6ee6e>
>>
>> In short, he's suggesting to just use the top two Approval winners.
>> That seems likely to motivate candidates of the dominant party to
>> unite as clones of one another, but maybe I'm missing something.
>> Still, the KISS principle of his proposal is appealing.
>>
>> I think I'm pretty close to being able to write up draft 3 of MAF,
>> which should be simple enough.  What I have in mind now is basically:
>> "allow all candidates who (usually) get over 50% approval, and allow a
>> (usually) equal number of opposition candidates who get over 40%
>> approval".  The first "(usually)" acknowledges the possibility that
>> there may not be any candidate that gets over 50% approval, and the
>> second "(usually)" acknowledges that there might not be any candidates
>> who qualify as opposition candidates, or that the opposition
>> candidates may be outnumbered.
>>
>> Rob
>>
>
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